Wesley Faulkner: 6 Firefox Add-ons for B2B Social Media Management

6 Firefox Add-ons for B2B Social Media Management

By Jeffrey L. Cohen

Thu, Feb 18, 2010

B2B, Social Media Marketing

There are lots of reasons B2B communicators use Firefox when surfing the web, which include things like stability, security and support of open source software, but the best reason is the customization available with add-ons. There are over 1100 add-ons that are categorized as Social and Communications and we are going to look a few of them that people use to help manage their social media tasks. Note that if you haven%u2019t installed add-ons before, they do not get installed without restarting Firefox. Generally all the open tabs will reload on a restart, but sometimes they don%u2019t.

Yoono
Yoono runs in left hand sidebar of your browser and lets you interact with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and various chat platforms without giving up large amounts of screen real estate. You can view your social profiles combined or separate, and you can also post status updates, post photos and share links to your networks. You can easily choose which networks to post to with every post. It incorporates bit.ly link shortening, but it seems to share links without including the title of the post. Make sure you test each aspect of any tool before you start fully implementing it.

Amplify
Amplify allows you to share links and selections from pages by bringing up a sharing toolbar. These links post to your selected networks, as well as aggregate on a profile page at Amplify.com with your comments. This combines the ability to share links on multiple networks with one click and they all point back to a single post on Amplify, which includes comments and a social network.

Buzz It
So you have heard about Buzz and you want an easy way to use it. Buzz It creates a bookmarklet in your Firefox toolbar. When you are on a page you want to share in Buzz, click the bookmarklet and it will open a GMail message that lets you send the link and comments to buzz. This is one of many ways to share things on Buzz.

Feedly
Feedly is one of the best Firefox social media add-ons because it brings a familiar web magazine layout to RSS readers. Using your Google profile, it presents all your feeds in an easily digestible format that doesn%u2019t focus on the number of posts you haven%u2019t read (like Google Reader does). There%u2019s lots going on in this tool including details about how your content is shared, displaying content of the same type, like video, grouped together regardless of its source, a small toolbar that helps you share across networks, and discovery tools for finding additional relevant content. Load up this tool and dig in to learn more about your social graph and to overcome your fears of RSS.

Tweecious
I heard of Tweecious thanks to Kipp%u2019s recent post about Delicious and social bookmarking. This has got to be one of the slickest tools I have seen, from both an interface side and from a functionality side. When you click setup, it says here%u2019s your Twitter account and here%u2019s your Delicious account, and gives you the opportunity to change them. The only question is do you want to grab links from previous tweets or just go forward. That%u2019s it. It runs in the background and grabs any links you post to Twitter and saves them as Delicious bookmarks. If you are saving links as reference for future review, it is a good idea to save them in multiple places.

If there is one theme running through this list, it is the ability to more easily manage multiple networks. So one of the things to watch out for is creating duplicate content on aggregation networks, like FriendFeed. One great use for this is to create a feed of shared links. Tweecious can grab your links from your corporate Twitter account, but not conversations, and create a list of links in Delicious. Now you can use the Delicious feed that was automatically created.

Pixel Pipe Media Uploader
And finally, this list is not complete without a tool to upload media to your various networks. Pixel Pipe Media Uploader can upload photos, video and audio to more than 110 networks. If you are pushing content out to multiple networks at once this is an easy way to do it, however, add networks carefully, because every upload goes to every network. It would be great if there were an easy way to exclude some, but there are situations that warrant an all-in approach to content distribution. But make sure you visit these networks on a regular basis to respond to comments and interact with the community.

Have you used any of these tools, or are there others you would recommend to manage social media activities for your B2B company?

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Tags: amplify, buzz, Delicious, Facebook. LinkedIn, Feedly, Google, pixel pipe, RSS, Tweecious, Twitter, yoono