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.
Hey Dejan. Thanks for this awesome write-up. We appreciate your thoughts and are glad we can help solve a problem.
Feel free to reach out if you or any of your readers have questions!
Alexis
VP of Customers
Postling
Alexis@postling.com
How do you feel about Postling vs other established aggregators like TweetDeck and Hootsuite?
Hi Ben,
I’m not too familiar with Hootsuite but have used Tweetdeck somewhat. It’s pretty good also, though for purposes of social media based marketing I certainly think Postling has more to offer, simply because it spans multiple networks (unlike Tweetdeck).
This is handy for the simple reason that usually, whatever your business happens to be, your customers won’t all be exclusively using the single same network.
Personal use is another matter entirely and for this I would no doubt expect individual users to find something like Tweetdeck to be more useful, enhancing as it does the experience of a single network (in this case, Twitter) which for many users is the only network on which they are active enough to require such a tool…
Thanks for reading,
Dejan
Every time I try to use Postling and link it to my Facebook Page:http://www.facebook.com/pages/Neil-Fairbrother-Interim/142811319070451?v=wall
I get an error message.
Hey ho.
Neil
Hi Neil,
Not sure what’s happened there – but maybe drop Alexis a line (see his comment above) to see if he can help.
Thanks for reading!
Dejan
This sounds like a really great tool for balancing our time and efforts. Thx for the well-written and highly informative blog.
We are going to try to use postling for our needs.
And it’s not free either! it says it’s $3 per social account! that’s a hell of a lot per month.
Hey ersates,
You’re right that it isn’t free – though I’m pretty sure that it was back when I wrote this post around a year ago (I could be wrong – have struggled to find info to confirm either way).
Anyway, according to Postling, many of the small business owners that they were in communication with actively told them that they would be happy to pay for a tool such as Postling – hence the charges being introduced.
I suppose the amount is always going to be relative to a business’s turnover, costs etc and so will probably seem like a luxury to some (especially perhaps in the beginning) while resembling pittance to others…
thanks for reading,
Dejan