As each day passes, it seems as though we have one more new social media profile to manage for one reason or another. Particularly helpful for small to medium sized businesses who use social media sites as marketing tools is an application that can help to consolidate all of these sites and make it easier to engage from one location. We’re here to provide you with advice on the top applications that can help you do just that.

HootSuite – This social media site aggregator is free for the first five social media profiles (which works if you only use a few of them anyway), but becomes a paid service when you want additional social media profiles included, and other services. These services include Facebook insights, ad opt-out, influence scores, and other analytics that are valuable in measuring your success on social media.

Great for businesses is also the fact that Salesforce integrates nicely into Hootesuite, as do WordPress, MailChimp, and Constant Contact. In other words, you can get a great deal of work done within this one app. One of the greatest benefits with the HootSuite Pro version is the ability to schedule multiple future posts by importing a .csv file (or manually if you prefer). For those running a business, this particular service is invaluable, as no one wants to have to keep going back to their profiles in order to shoot out tweets and Facebook messages every day.

Alternion – Alternion, a free product, manages all social media apps for you, while also integrating your multiple email accounts so that you essentially rarely have to leave this one browser! What’s nice is that it easily allows for different views, so that you can look at only Facebook, or only LinkedIn, or both combined so that you don’t have to look at them separately. Sometimes you also only want to look at photos or videos, so Alternion aggregates those as well!

TweetDeck – This is an entirely free product and inclusive of unlimited social media profiles unlike HootSuite’s free version. HootSuite’s paid service, however, offers more advanced services than TweetDeck’s free service. What’s nice about TweetDeck that is also great about Alternion is that all streams can be integrated into one stream, where HootSuite keeps different media streams in separate tabs. Some people will prefer the ability to keep them separate. TweetDeck can also be downloaded to one’s desktop, and has a very nice columned view. This application is fantastic from a usability perspective. When you want to do more than just Tweet, use these apps to consolidate social media and communicate in one fell swoop.

Look no further if you want to consolidate those many different social media methods of communication that you use to connect with customers or friends. These handy social media consolidation applications will not only help you to save time, but they will also help you to keep fewer of those pesky browsers open! All three of the recommended applications have many of the same features to offer, so much of it comes down to whether or not you want to pay for the additional features offered by HootSuite, and which interface makes you feel more at home.

Do you have a favorite social media management application to recommend? Tell us about it!

Editor’s Note

Thanks to Cara Aley for this guest post. She is a freelance writer who writes about everything from matters relating to your online reputation for Reptutation.com to digital marketing solutions for small businesses.