Seesmic Social Media Client – Social Cluttering Done Right

Seesmic Logo

Every web marketer using social media on a daily basis needs a social media client. You simply can’t log in and out of dozen different Twitter or Facebook accounts manually several times a day. So the concern is not ‘if,’ but ‘which?’

Originally built as a social video sharing service by French entrepreneur Loic Le Meuron, Seesmic purchased Twitter client Twhirl soon after its inception and set its route as an ambitious social media client. After acquiring Ping.fm a year ago, Seesmic’s creators decided to try to climb to the leading position on the social media management market, and the slightly overblown statements on their site try to persuade visitors that they’ve already succeeded. So, what is Seesmic? A good solution for social media management? Maybe. Will it “take your online brand to the next level?” Not so sure about that.

Don’t get me wrong – seesmic is a very nice product. It allows you to manage dozens of accounts across all possible social networks. It’s totally cross-platform, so whether you want to use it on your PC, Mac, or Smartphone (with any operating system), you can – this is still rather unique feature. You can choose either a web or a desktop version (unfortunately, they’re not synchronized) — both with fancy graphic design and columns that scroll both vertically and horizontally. It looks pretty amazing (especially with the desktop version), but you may find out that navigating through the flood of columns needs a few minutes of learning. You can always turn off horizontal scrolling and go with one column if you wish so.

Seesmic allows you to collect feeds and updates. You can sort them, post tweets and retweets, change statuses, and follow mentions — in short, you can do pretty much anything that comes to mind when you think “social media.” The development team keeps adding new plugins in a rapid pace and shares everything on the Seesmic blog, good sign they take their job pretty seriously. However, I am still waiting for one important thing.

Using social media for online marketing is like searching for a pearl: you might discover a real treasure, but you’ll most likely end up with just an empty shell. When you pass through the veil of social media hype, you realize that the key thing you need is a good social media strategy. Building a brand name, networking, selling products, building links, syndicating content, managing reputation – all these activities require a well-designed, unique strategy — often on a completely different social network. Unfortunately, what we can often see is just marketers’ frontal attack with a few territory gains and a lot of casualties. You end up with a knot of useless ‘friends,’ a waterfall of feeds and updates, and ranks of half-finished blogs and profile pages with no meaningful content. Your message simply gets lost in the social media ocean, along with your precious time.

Seesmic, Sobees, Yoono, Digsby, Tweetdeck, Hootsuite — all of these social media clients offer you different graphic layout, integration of services and user-friendly interface. In terms of these features, Seesmic looks like a good choice. Nice looking, fast, cooperating with every service which comes to your mind, universal for each platform, with ambitious development team.

But it’s just a prince, not the king, which has not arrived yet. ‘I want numbers, I want metrics, I want graphs, I want pie charts! I need to monitor how many links I got here, how many bookmarks I received there, and how many friends were added last week so I can cut loose the dead ends quickly.’ I’m sure that one day, somebody will come up with a robust technical solution to divide and conquer social networks. In the meantime, Seesmic is pretty good for paddling in the social media ocean.
 

Seesmic’s multi column layout -  putting your social updates in order