Speeding Up Social Media: Digsby and Seesmic

Facebook and Twitter, two social media giants, have become powerful and useful tools for businesses to build their brands. A key to seeing results is keeping track of your audiences and injecting yourself into the conversation when appropriate.

However, its increasingly time consuming to monitor that activity as the platform add more features and other ones gain adoption. Jumping between even the two big platforms of Twitter and Facebook is no mean feat.

Seesmic is a helper application that pulls and organizes your Twitter and Facebook on your desktop – making sure you don’t miss any tweets or wall posts. It has reached 2.5 million downloads, and super usable clean design, just like gmail.

You can basically do everything that you usually do on Facebook with Seesmic’s desktop app. For instance, posting comments, sending messages, feeds and replying messages can all be done without visiting Facebook. Updating your Twitter status is a snap and you can passively track others newest tweets without log-in hassles.

Digsby is another great application that lets you control social media, email, and instant messaging all at once. According to monthly visitor data from web analytics cruncher Compete, Digsby ranks #3 out of the top 21 Twitter applications.

In fact, some consider Digsby more powerful than Seesmic, becayse it lets you manage multiple conversations with your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Facebook Chat. In addition, you can control your email in Digsby, including Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail, and IMAP.

On top of all this, It helps you stay up to date with social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Linkedin – making it the one stop shop for not only social media, but communication in general.

Social media has speed up our online conversation, and tools like Seesmic and Digsby can definitely help you manage it in a sane way, spending more of your time on the positive attributes of social media platforms.

Photos by stevegarfield and Jeff Hester