Social Media

Social Media Design For Dummies
By Janine Warner, David LaFontaine
Great social media design means knowing how to create a professional, effective, and cohesive profile that will better communicate your brand's story to future partners, employers, and customers. Social media is an important way to build personal and professional networks, search for jobs, find old friends, and more. Discover the essentials tools you'll need to help manage or share your social media, research trends, and keep up with social media scores (how do you rate?).

7 Social Media Management Tools to Consider
If you have so many social media platforms that it's difficult to keep up with all of them, then consider a social media management tool. In fact, one is probably essential to keep your brand content consistent across all the sites.

Here are a few social media management tools to help you get control over your little piece of real estate on the Internet.

HootSuite makes it easy to manage multiple profiles across multiple social media sites.

Nimble makes it possible to manage your e-mail, contacts, social media messages, and more all in one central dashboard.

SproutSocial provides social media management.

JustUnFollow is a Twitter service that can help you manage the people you follow as well as those who follow you back.

Fake Follow checks whether your followers, or anyone else's, are using fake accounts on Twitter.

Wildfire is for managing social media promotions and giveaways.

AgoraPulse, a Facebook management and analytics tool, is for advanced users who want to build apps for friends or customers to use

3 Tools to Make Social Media Sharing Easier
Giving your viewers a way to share your content is a must when you're designing your social media sites. It's also proper etiquette to shorten URLs that you share when you have limited space to get your point across. Here are a few tools to aid you:

AddThis is a service you can use to add a row of links and sharing icons to the most popular social media sites.

bitly is an online service that you can use to create shortened versions of any URL.

SharedBy also shortens URLs so you share them more efficiently on social media sites