Category Archives: Skype

10 Tools That Will Make You a Social Media Guru

These 10 tools will help you manage your individual or business social media accounts without breaking the bank.

10 Tools That Will Make You a Social Media Guru
Do you aspire to be a social media guru but find yourself befuddled by the large number of social media tools available? Here we help you narrow the options for managing your social media accounts by identifying 10 of the best online tools. All are either free or available for a reasonable subscription fee that any individual or a small business can afford.

Bitly
Bitly, probably the best-known UR- shortening service around, helps keep the links that you post on your social media accounts neat and tidy. Under the hood, the service features real-time analytics so you can track actual clicks. More importantly, the service supports the use of one custom domain name for free and implements all the necessary logic. You can brand your shortened URL the same way the big-time players do, like nyti.ms (The New York Times) and econ.st (The Economist).

Buffer
Buffer ranks among the most popular social media message scheduling service available. You can share content and schedule posts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ pages with a single click. The service makes it possible to stagger content throughout the day, constantly populating your social media feeds with new updates. Buffer also offers analytics about the reach of your posts and makes it easy to re-post popular content.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an advanced social media management dashboard designed to help organizations or power users manage multiple social media accounts. The online service works with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ pages and other popular social networks. It offers a comprehensive range of reports that let you gain greater insights into ongoing social campaigns. Hootsuite starts off as a free service for individuals; various subscription tiers are available for power or business users.

Pagemodo
The Pagemodo social marketing suite can help small businesses quickly create engaging visuals for Facebook. Its features include tools to manage Facebook pages and to create customized, eye-catching cover photos, visual posts and even custom tabs for contests. New posts go live immediately or according to a schedule, and they can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other platforms.

Social Mention
The Social Mention real-time social media search and analysis tool scrapes user-generated content across more than 100 social media sites for mentions of a given company name, brand, product or search term. Considered among the best free listening tools on the market, Social Mention’s analyses delivers relevant results, with metrics that includes unique authors, reach, frequency of mentions and top keywords.

SocialBro
SocialBro helps businesses better target and engage with their Twitter audience. It can analyze followers’ timelines of followers to generate reports (such as the optimal time to tweet for reach and engagements), to identify key influencers and competitors, and to gain general analytics insights. SocialBro works best when coupled with a scheduling tool such as Buffer or Hootsuite. It’s free with basic features for accounts with less than 5,000 Twitter followers.

SocialOomph
The SocialOomph Web service offers a long list of productivity enhancements across supported services. That list includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Plurk, as well as blogs built with WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and Moveable Type. Available for free with some basic features, the paid version of SocialOomph can schedule Facebook updates and LinkedIn shares, automatically follow back followers, search for worthwhile Twitter friends to follow and even tweet via email.

Sprout Social
The Sprout Social management and engagement tool can post, monitor and analyze multiple social media accounts from one location. The service offers the ability to monitor messages across Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn personal profiles, all through a single inbox. A paid service that comes with a free 30-day trial, Sprout Social also offers real-time brand monitoring and comprehensive reporting tools to help users understand important metrics.

Tweepi
The Twitter-only management tool Tweepi makes it easy to identify (and get rid of) followers who unfollow and inactive users, as well as to find interesting new users by scraping the followers of specified Twitter accounts. The paid version offers smart shortcuts that let users quickly follow or unfollow large number of users at a time. It ranks among the more powerful tool for managing Twitter accounts with thousands of followers.

TweetDeck
As its name suggests, the free TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter) is a Web and desktop solution for monitoring and managing Twitter feeds on a single screen. TweetDeck incorporates powerful filters based on specific keywords or conditions. It also offers the flexibility to customize the display to show or hide columns to better focus on what matters. TweetDeck is available for the Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari browsers, as well as Windows and Mac computers.


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Skype app for iPhone due out from Microsoft today

But years of disappointment with the iPhone Skype app have undoubtedly led many users to switch to other options long ago

Microsoft promises that a revamped Skype app for the iPhone will be significantly better than the current version, although it may be too late for users who have long since switched to other options.

Microsoft is hoping users will be lured back, saying that version 5.0 of the IM, audio/video communications and IP telephony app, due out Thursday, has been rebuilt from the ground up. The company pledges it is faster and more stable than the old version, and that its user interface has been redesigned to make it simpler and more fluid.

“We’re excited for you to see how the new app has been redesigned to put your conversations first, providing you with a smoother, leaner and more integrated experience,” wrote Microsoft official Gary Wong in a blog post.

Microsoft is also promising that Skype 5.0 for iPhone will stay synchronized with users’ other instances of Skype on other platforms, so that, for example, read messages won’t appear elsewhere as unread, a major complaint with the previous version of the app.

Last week, Microsoft gave a sneak peek at some of the app’s major enhancements, including smoother scrolling among screens and the ability to send messages and photos to users who are offline.

Apparently, Microsoft plans to speed up the pace of improvements for the app going forward. “Skype 5.0 for iPhone is just the beginning of a new Skype experience on iPhone,” Wong wrote, a statement that’s in line with the company’s strategic shift under new CEO Satya Nadella to make sure its software products work well on non-Windows platforms.

Skype 5.0 for iPhone requires iOS 7 or a later version. An iPad edition of the app is in the works.


 


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