There’s a nice write-up over at social media blog, Soshable.com, about the virtues of Postling, a free social media aggregator. What I found interesting in that particular article is that the author felt obliged to clarify at the end of the entry that he had not been paid in any way by Postling to write the piece.
I could see why he felt the info was needed, the review was indeed so positive that one could be forgiven for suspecting that it had been funded by the owners of the object of scrutiny.
Well, having tested out Postling for myself, I now also feel the need to make it clear that nobody from the company has paid me to write this piece – it’s just that Postling really is genuinely, honestly, quite good.
The concept is simple: register quickly (for free) and Postling provides you with a clean and simple interface for managing all of your various social media accounts under one roof so to speak.
You can cross-post info from one network to another, monitor all of your feeds and update everything simultaneously. The whole concept is hardly radical, but it is executed very nicely indeed, particularly by way of a very attractive and functional user interface.
Now, for your average personal user, Postling is probably slightly unnecessary since it really requires you to be active on at least two or three fairly large networks to begin to represent a significant time-saver. However, for small business looking to utilise social media in order to run ad campaigns, build brand awareness, provide service updates or whatever else, Postling really comes into its own.
In essence it offers a great solution to one of the main problems of utilising social media for such purposes – namely that it can sometimes be a little bit confusing to track the impact and reach of what you’re doing, as well as being tricky to achieve more comprehensive target audience reach and so on. Well, Postling is nice since it means you don’t have to worry about wasting time repeating actions for each network (Facebook, twitter, wordpress, Flickr etc), plus you can view your campaign as a whole from a sort of HQ, making things easier to manage and to spot trends and test impact. Effectively, this removes the ‘artificial’ barriers which divided pockets of your market/audience into different networks – but essentially made it harder to co-ordinate a cohesive campaign. This indeed is a very laudable achievement, and surely a big step in advancing the specific toolset which makes social media such a valuable business tool.
