Our Three Favorite Social Media Tools
1. AddThis – Helps you Hit Them All
AddThis has over a billion users and is available in more than 50 languages. We use AddThis sharing to power the uPlaya marketing widgets, and you can use this tool to share other sites and pages.
The easiest way to use AddThis to share things quickly? Install it as a browser plugin. After AddThis is installed, the plugin will appear on your browser (the button will probably look like the graphic to the right). Whenever you discover a website or page you would like to share, just click on the button and select which way you would like to share.
AddThis supports nearly 300 different social networking tools, including several email formats and the major networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and StumbleUpon. Use AddThis to share music news, mentions of your music online, and anything else your fans would appreciate.
- Get the AddThis plugin for Chrome
- Get the AddThis plugin for Firefox
- Get the AddThis plugin for Internet Explorer
* Sidenote: you should also consider placing the AddThis plugin on your website. This will allow fans who visit your site to share it, even if they don’t have the AddThis plugin downloaded themselves. You can find the code for AddThis here.
2. Hootsuite – Schedule Great-Looking Facebook Posts
Hootsuite is a fantastic tool for managing and scheduling social media posts. We think it is the best tool for scheduling Facebook posts because it is one of the few free tools that doesn’t limit the amount of posts you can send, and Facebook posts from Hootsuite look more like original Facebook posts because Hootsuite allows you to include photos and videos.
When posting to Facebook and Twitter, timing can be everything. You want to post at a time where your fans will be near their computer and have time to read or listen to what you’re putting out there. With Hootsuite, you can schedule posts weeks in advance, which is great for busy musicians who can’t always be near their computers at just the right time.
3. TweetDeck – Track and Optimize Your Twitter Activity
TweetDeck not only schedules your posts, it provides a dashboard of everything your friends are saying, mentions of you, direct messages, trending topics and recommendations. Tweetdeck can also be personalized to display info for multiple Twitter accounts. You can break your followers up into lists for better tracking and each list can have its own column in your dashboard. Now that Twitter acquired Tweetdeck, it’s likely we can expect more updates and useful Twitter features. You can download Tweetdeck to your desktop and to your iPhone, iPad or Android phone.
Tweetdeck can also help you manage posts for Facebook, MySpace, Linkedin and Foursquare. If you want to use one tool and keep all of your posts in the same place, Tweetdeck can do that, however the posts for Facebook and Linkedin don’t look as appealing when they come from Tweetdeck, so we recommend using this tool only if your strongest media is Twitter.