Smart-phone technology is growing at such a rate that it is difficult to keep up with. It wasn’t too long ago that very few people even had cell phones, let alone the handheld computers that are so widely available now. Hell, it wasn’t really that long ago that most people didn’t even use computers. It’s crazy to think that for the last 3 years, I have carried a smart-phone in my pocket that is faster and more powerful than my first computer. It can take better pictures than most of the cameras that I have owned, and it can take far better videos than the majority of video-cameras that I have used.
Social-media is no different. I can still remember using my old Packard Bell 486 computer to dial into a bulletin board service (BBS) to communicate with my “hacker” friends from around town. Shortly after that, AOL became popular and people began to communicate quicker with chat rooms, on-line bulletins, and instant messages. Now social media has grown so much and has given birth to so many different networks, I now feel like I have to chose between them simply because I don’t have the time to keep up with them all. But it shouldn’t be that way! The beauty of social networks is that they all have something unique to offer. While some may be more popular than others, nobody is “the best”.
Every network has it’s purpose. Facebook is great for staying in touch with friends and relatives as it’s easy to share stories and post pictures. Twitter is a great way to meet people from around the world and not have your screen flooded with everyone’s Farmville achievements and family photos. It’s also a great news source if your not into RSS feeds. Google+ takes Twitter a couple steps further but doesn’t exactly replace it. It’s great for following large groups of people and then organizing them into “circles” to help filter out who you read about and who you share with. There is no on-size-fits-all when it comes to social networking.
So with that being said, here comes the problem…..
Like many others, I have a hard time keeping up with 3 social-networks, but I’m not really willing to give up any of them. I enjoy staying in touch with my friends and relatives on Facebook, networking and interacting with fellow bloggers and EMS professionals on Twitter, and having group discussions and meeting new people on Google+. The problem is doing all 3 without spending all day in front of a computer.
About 80-90% of my social networking is done on my phone. Working long-hour shifts on an ambulance doesn’t leave a lot of free-time at home, so I try and spend what time I can with my family. Sure, I bring my laptop to work with me almost every day, but there is nothing like the convenience of pulling out my phone between calls to check on my Twitter timeline or my Facebook wall. It’s even nice for writing small blog-posts. Smart-phones are great for doing these things, but switching between 3 social networking apps can be tedious and annoying. Try adding 2 Twitter accounts and 2 Facebook pages and you have yourself quite the cluster.
So how do we solve this problem?
I figured out really quick that using the native apps for the various social networks leaves much to be desired. The “Facebook for Android app” is nice, but it’s terrible for updating my blog pages. The Twitter app doesn’t handle multiple accounts well, it’s not very good with lists and it’s rather slow. So to fix this problem, I set out to find an app that handles both networks and makes posting to all my accounts easy. That’s when I found “Hootsuite“. The app handles Twitter and Facebook very well, and it handles multiple accounts and supports Facebook pages. And to top it off, it supports posting to “all of the above” at the same time. While Hootsuite will easily replace the native Twitter app, it won’t do the same for Facebook. Unfortunately it doesn’t handle Facebook chat, messages or friend requests. So until those features are added, “Facebook for Android” will remain on my phone. As of right now Google+ isn’t supported on any 3rd-party apps that I know of, but the native app is well built and continues to improve.
A big part of staying on top of all your social networking accounts is organization. Like I said earlier, every network has it’s purpose. Figure out what each network does for you and try to keep it that way. I don’t try and communicate with my friends or family on Twitter, and I don’t typically discuss EMS related issues on Facebook. Being that I don’t personally know the majority of people that I follow on Twitter, I don’t worry so much about reading EVERY SINGLE POST. I also utilize lists to help separate all the people I follow into categories. For example, I follow a bunch of news sources, so I place all of them into a “news” list. Likewise, all of the people involved in EMS go into my “EMS” list, and so forth. By doing this, I can select the group of people that I want to follow or communicate with without having to scroll past all of the posts from other people that I follow. Hootsuite makes this easy too. As you can see on the picture above, the app allows you to organize all of your different social networks into “tabs”, and your lists or pages can be placed either within those tabs or on their own separate tabs. You can customize the alerts for each network, and post to all of them simultaneously or separately.
Hootsuite isn’t the only app that handles multiple social networks, but it works best for what I am trying to accomplish. Here is a list of some other 3rd-party apps that can be used to organize all of your social networks:
