SOCIAL MEDIA DASHBOARDS COMPARISONS
Social media dashboards are sites that help connect and sync all your social media profiles into one organized location. It allows you to see the recent news feeds in one place, instead of having to log in to multiple sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. 3 of the top 10 dashboards are currently Hootsuite, Cyfe, and Seesmic.
Hootsuite is one of the social media dashboards that a lot of businesses have turned to recently. It is available in 13 different languages and can be accessed with accounts on Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Once the networks have been synced you are able to follow the latest newsfeed in different columns. Hootsuite can be used to send tweets, retweet, mention, and post on walls. By adding tabs to the group streams it will separate all the social media accounts activated there. Hootsuite is free for up to 3 social profiles without any collaboration, however, if you are looking to add more than three there is a fee of $9.99/mo, which allows you to access over 50 profiles. At this time, Hootsuite allows the following social networks to be added:
However, the problem with Hootsuite is that when you post something on Facebook through the dashboard, it does not track the likes, shares, and comments on the post. The insights do not further give credit for the likes or the comments the post gets. The URL shortener is really expensive if it is used over time and it adds up to the business costs. Starting from $49.99 to shorten one URL to $540 for a year, other websites are willing to do this for free without any costs associated and businesses would rather use them then using this function on Hootsuite.
Cyfe is another social media dashboard that is being used by businesses and people across the globe; it connects all the online activities and not just your social media activities. There is no sign up cost for this website and all you need is a username, password and an email address. The tool has a variety of widgets for different purposes, such as:
With Cyfe, you can even add your competitor’s dashboard so that you can monitor their progress with yours simultaneously. Cyfe offers a “forever free plan,” which costs $19/mo for unlimited team members, dashboards and widgets; or if you were paying annually it would cost $14/mo. No matter how good a dashboard is it always has to have a few drawbacks and that includes Cyfe. There is a minor issue with clarifying how URLs’ should be structured to pull data. Another drawback for Cyfe is that some data sources are not clear when extracted for review by users.
Last but not least, Seesmic is a social media dashboard that is being used vastly; it allows users to manage unlimited Twitter accounts as well as Facebook and Google accounts. This dashboard is well designed and can be sorted out into a variety of timelines detailing tweets, retweets, mentions, direct messages and lists. It even posts popular topics making it easier to join conversations. This dashboard is clean of viruses and can afford to update several statuses, send direct messages, and check into locations.
With Seesmic there are no analytics so businesses cannot find their return on investment and without doing that no business would want to put money into something unless they know the return is beneficial for them. It works really slowly on Android updated phones making it hard for people to use the app and it could lead to frustrated users. If someone makes a Retweet it will not show who made it and you will never be able to find it and will always be curious, as businesses always want to know who retweeted them. Seesmic also has poor services and needs to be updated, in order to fix the glitches and bugs that have been causing the dashboard to become less popular with it’s users.