Since it was purchased by Twitter and its interface was dramatically overhauled, TweetDeck just hasn't been the same as it once was. And though we still use the service, we know there are some users out there looking for a new social networking management service. To that end, we've compiled the six best TweetDeck alternatives available now.
Each of these services offers the same functionality of TweetDeck, with some added benefits that we find particularly interesting. So read on, social media mavens, to see what TweetDeck alternatives the Web has to offer.
One of the original social media tools, Hootsuite allows you to post to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, as well as several others from an easy to setup and use interface. As with TweekDeck and Seesmic, Hootsuite puts an emphasis on what others are saying, offering you a series of columns for direct and personal messages, sent messages and a general feed. Scheduling tools help you prepare posts ahead of time, while the analytics tool helps you create branded and printable reports about how well your social media campaigns are performing.
Wildfire, like Hootsuite, is geared more toward social media marketing professionals. The service offers a host of enticing features including a page manager, messenger and promotions tool. In addition to the standard messaging features, users can create custom landing pages for their Facebook pages, social promotions such as contests and coupons and gauge user engagement through the service's analytics manager. Wildfire also allows you to post entire photo albums and Flash-based items to your account. The services scheduler is also extremely effective, allowing you to schedule updates for each of your social networking accounts and view them all from one dashboard based on their scheduled posting time.
Twimbow, although still in its beta stages, is a social network aggregator that adds a twist to the already tried-and-true formula of viewing your friends' updates via different columns. Twimbow’s biggest feature is its use of a color-coding system, that makes it easy to identify a specific type of tweet through how they appear on your dashboard. For instance, the Personal Buzz category arranges direct messages sent to followers as one color and direct messages sent from your followers to you in another color. Standard tweets and retweets by you and of your posts and mentions are all arranged in specific colors.
ConstantContact’s NutShellMail is a bit different than most other social media management services. Instead of having to scour a dashboard for updates from friends and followers, NutShellMail sends everything to you in one convenient email. The service essentially provides you with a snapshot of the day’s social media activity, without forcing you to monitor each of your networks. Emails sent by NutShellMail can be fully customized, allowing you to determine what updates you see and when. You can also choose how many items from each update type are included in your email. Users can also select which friends, pages and groups you receive updates from.
Seesmic wins major points for interfacing with not only Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but also users’ SalesForce Chatter accounts. But that’s not all. Seesmic users can also share videos, photos and location information via YouTube, TwitPic, yFrog and Lockerz from one platform. Seesmic allows you to add an unlimited number of account types, as long as the service supports them. Plug-ins are available to add integration from services that the standard Seesmic app doesn’t include, such as Tumblr and Flickr.
Bottlenose has been generating major buzz around the web thanks to its unique Sonar tool. The feature allows users to see what's trending and how the topics relate via a a relationship graph. The graphs can be customized based on people you follow, mentions, sent, news, pictures and more. In addition to the relationship graph, Bottlenose also provides you with a basic update feed stream, as well as the multi-column view offered by Tweetdeck. Posting messages to Facebook and Twitter is easy thanks to the authoring tool located at the bottom of the screen. However, there is no option to schedule posts ahead of time. Then again, the software is still in beta, so such a feature could very well be added in the future.
