Only For Writers Serious About Marketing: SocialOomph Professional

“I’d cut my grocery budget before I’d give up my professional upgrade to Social Oomph.” Yes, I really said this to a friend. Here’s why.

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Marketing is as vital to writers as writing the book, but it can’t take over our work days. For this reason, most of the professionals I know use at least the free version of SocialOomph. Originally it was called TweetLater because it was an advanced aggregate program for twitter only. They have long since evolved into a cockpit for posting and managing all your social media, and more.

With the free version you can schedule your tweets, save and reuse tweet drafts for later use, set up automatic direct messages. You can even extend your twitter Profile so that the one link you’re allowed in twitter Profile leads to a whole page with photos, text, html, links and more.

You can also use their dld.bz URL shortening to track your clicks and get all kinds of useful and insightful click statistics, auto follow/unfollow, vet new followers, view @mentions & retweets. Social Oomp lists them all and allows you to reply, view the tweet, retweet or DM.

Get your own RSS feed, but much more than a simple feed. You can schedule and publish tweets that only stream to your feed, not to twitter. It’s available as RSS, XML and Javascript. And of course you get an unlimited number of accounts.

There are a number of free aggregate type programs that do nearly as much as SocialOomph, (not all) but not nearly as seamlessly. And because I’m serious about the necessity of marketing, I upgraded to the professional version as soon as they offered it.

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Additional Features in Professional Upgrade  $29.97/mo

(Don’t bother with what follows unless you are serious about your social media marketing)

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Ping.fm Integration

This alone changes our social media marketing life. Ping.fm is my core social media aggregate, or program that composites them all from a central service, but Ping only brings all my social media sites together, it offers none of the advances functions.

SocialOomph integrates seamlessly with Ping so that every tweet scheduled to post shows up in each and every social site I’ve already added to our Ping account, which is dozens. Some other aggregates besides SocialOomp offer Ping integration also, but I have found few, if any, that do everything else the Professional upgrade to SocialOomph does, and certainly not as inexpensively.

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Recurring updates

This, and Ping integration, are the main features for which I upgraded to Professional.  I have dozens of these recurring updates that each holds dozens – 100 posts. Some of my recurring updates are for general writing tips, some for general photography tips, a separate one for each of my promotional clients’ launches, social media education, contests, news about Visual Arts Junction, news about Promotion á la Carte and Buzz Club, etc.

Each of these revolves specifically scheduled updates, randomly posting one every few days. You can schedule the recurrences as often as you wish. I include so many different posts there are seldom repeats, unless I purposely want something to repeat. This keeps me out of trouble with twitter about repeating tweets.

And I add to the informational posts almost daily. Set the exact time of day, how many times you want it cycle, or pause it if you want to reuse it later. You can also save them as drafts to save tons of time never having to retype your posts.

Using this function I can offer posts that teach literally books worth of information to friends and followers. Just last month a man on Facebook wrote to tell me how much he’d learned from the info I post, and proclaimed himself a life-long follower.  I often receive thank-you’s from followers for all the free education I provide.

I could go without making one tweet for four months and still be posting 5-10 important and time-sensitive tweets per day that seldom repeated. Of course I sprinkle in recurring updates that talk about my own books, photography and promotion business. But you can see the value and power of this function, especially when you link it with your Ping.fm account.

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Drip Feed to Your Social Accounts

Visualize a reservoir (or several) each holding all your posts about a certain time-sensitive subject.  You want these to drip feed one by one to the social accounts you choose, or all of them, at times you specify.  They don’t recur, as with the recurring updates above. Once the reservoir is empty the tweets stop.

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Facebook Features for Your Profile and/or (formerly Fan) Pages

Sometimes you need to schedule status updates differently for Facebook or Facebook Pages than for twitter. There are several functions available. You can schedule to post to your Profile or your Pages, one of your Pages, or all plus your profile. This is a great function as it gives such flexible choices.

When you combine this feature with the Ping integration that posts to all your dozens of sites including LinkedIn you can say goodbye to all your other apps. Don’t worry about forgetting to apply those site-hash tags and ending up with duplicate after duplicate on your various social media. SocialOomph takes care of the fuss all from one dashboard.

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Schedule & Publish Blog Post & Pages

This is a powerful feature. Add your own blog’s posts right from the dashboard, and add unlimited number of blogs. As long as your blog has one of the following remote publishing APIs, you can schedule posts for it: Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress API (wordpress.com and self-hosted), metaWeblogAPI, Movable Type API, Blogger API, and Atom API.

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Find Friends in Your Niche & Auto Add to twitter Lists

What I like here is that the Friend Finder is about quality not quantity. Keyword searches are great for following friends whose interests are the same as yours. Attach certain keywords to one of your twitter lists and when you follow one of the those tweeters they will automatically be added to that list. These reports can be filtered to several criteria, such as following-to-follower ratio, and ignoring tweeter profiles that contain certain words.

You may also apply the decisions of other tweeters by ignoring all accounts flagged as spam or that have been blocked by fellow SocialOomph users. The report is sent to you with all these parameters applied. You just decide which of the hand-picked friends you want to add to your twitter list.

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Define Channels

Choose a list of favorite friends, or those in the same business, and create your own twitter channel. It’s like your own tweet timeline, except a channel contains only the tweets from those users that you include in the channel. You can define an unlimited number of channels. You don’t even have to follow someone to include that person in a channel.

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Followers With Clout

This is a good tool for business, but not just to list who is most important. Do you know which of your followers have the largest reach in terms of the number of people who follow them? That is exactly what the follower clout list tells you. The list shows you the fifty most influential people who are following you, judged by the number of people who are following them. They are already following you, so they will probably appreciate it if you reached out to build a better relationship with them.

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Direct Message Broadcast

You can send/schedule a direct message to every one of your followers, but only your StatusNet followers. I listed this because I’m hoping that soon SocialOomph will include this for our twitter followers too.

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And Much More, Such As…

Manage direct messages with auto spam control you define yourself, forward DMs to others, manage all your accounts in TweetCockpit, which has numerous controls, mute annoying tweeters (this avoids reporting them or blocking and putting their account in danger of cancellation by twitter, delegate account management to your assistant, schedule replies and DMs to their own time zones, bulk upload your posts, Sync friends and followers list, wipe your friends list and start anew, run your own bots. And I still haven’t listed all the functions.

I’ve seen most of SocialOomp’s functions offered elsewhere but always in separate programs. Who wants to log in to a dozen programs daily when you can log in to one? SocialOomph is the only site to shave your marketing time so dramatically by giving all this to you in one place.

I hate automation for automation’s sake, or the sake of quantity vs. quality. But this is automation that doesn’t seem automated. When I am offered a means to communicate to my social media friends on a very personal level within seamless automation, I’m a fan.

Seriously, if you’re serious about you’re writing business, at least check out SocialOomph Professional upgrade.

To subscribe free or update to Professional SocialOomph click here.

Please be advised that I so highly recommend this program I have become an affiliate, but this is by no means the reason for this post.

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