The first concern I had regarding social media streaming was that all my accounts, and their login info, is in one place for hackers to get at and the truth is - i'm a bit paranoid about these things (i feel weird checking my email on the bus WiFi) and if hackers really were skilled enough they wouldnt need all of it on a plate.
With a bit of a look around i found this could be useful, both in terms of keeping up with group and twitter activity for LIS but also if i wanted to get going on my entertainment news blogging again as i often find information across Facebook, Twitter and the internet at large. The requirement for this post was to reflect on one of the options, but i prefer to look at the ones I can sign up for and talk a bit about each. For the main part, however, I focus on HootSuite.
Due to the mobile app download requirements of Flipbook, i went for Hoot suite, which is something i've came across on Twitter before. The limit of 3 feeds (particularly in terms of linkedin groups) is a bit of a letdown as this could be so useful if it went across more LinkedIn groups. My email already compresses updates on LinkedIn so it'd have to be worth my while to use a different platform for connecting social media outlets. Particularly since, although the cross platform posting sounds useful, i'm not using social media for work at the moment and any other news blogging i'm doing, Facebook and twitter already cross-platform post to each other, meaning posting to my Facebook group via Hootsuite would double-post on twitter. The useful item on this may be scheduling, but cant Facebook groups already do that?
It is however very useful for looking at feeds on your screen in the one place. I do find it difficult to keep up with all the Twitter accounts i follow (especially since my tweet alerts to my phone don't seem to work any more) and having them in lists takes time to switch between them where you can have various lists spread across your Hootsuite. Despite my earlier comments, i'm not knocking it as a useful posting tool - it would be more of use should i use it in the future for work as LinkedIn and other social media that aren't Facebook and Twitter can be added in that I wouldn't necessarily use for my entertainment news sharing. I would just need to get a pro account for this to be of benefit.
Google alerts is something i used before. I cant remember unsubscribing from it but i don't think i get the alerts anymore. This is something that could be useful; if you use your librarian skills on search engines well as too general terms will give you too general results and result overload.
Buffer may be of use in the future also as it allows you to schedule links to share rather than just posts and you can edit the post depending on the platform you're sharing to.
*PAT ON BACK*
