This is Dedicated…

There are a lot of “multi-tools” around that will help you keep your social media accounts in some kind of organized order, but I have be experimenting with a really basic approach that I’m finding to be greatly to my liking. The problems I have had in the past with the Swiss Army Knife approach that many of the mashup tools employ have been numerous. To begin with, they can be rather complicated, despite what the marketing might tell you. I like to think that I’m pretty savvy online, but some of these applications have led me down some baffling paths. Also, not all of the social media accounts work as well on any given platform as others, so although one tool might be perfect for tweeting and posting to Facebook, it might not work so well for LinkedIn or Pinterest. Then too, the tools may let you post to your SM accounts, but when you want to use other functions, you end up having to go to the native application after all. Also, when you try to put all of your eggs (or accounts) in one basket, you can wind up with a pretty cluttered screen! Finally, because of the different ways you can post information to your online channels, sometimes limitations associated with one platform are counterproductive on others. Twitters character limitation comes to mind, as it is more restrictive than most, so if I craft a message that I want to tweet, and I try to upload it to LinkedIn, for example, at the same time, I am probably not sending the best possible version of my message to LinkedIn, where I have more space to write my thoughts. This type of limitation might also occur with delayed posting options which can vary from platform to platform.

In search of another alternative that would suit me better, and give me the controls I wanted, I hit upon the idea of using a separate browser for my social media accounts, different from the one I use for my day-to-day surfing/research/business activities. My go-to browser is Google Chrome, but I won’t argue with you if you prefer to use Firefox or even (dare I say it) internet Explorer. There are a bunch of others as well, and perhaps one of those is atop your preference list. I encourage you to stick with it, but then pick your second choice for what follows. In my case the second choice is Opera (http://www.opera.com) a very highly ranked choice in the browser competitive space. So I am using Chrome for most of my day-to-day online actions, and Opera for my dedicated social media platform experience. Here’s what I did, try it and see if you like it as well.

Once I opened the Opera browser, I systematically pulled up my Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube accounts and made sure I was logged in to my main page for each. Theoretically you could add dozens more Social Media accounts, but we all have – or should have – our limits and mine is 7! Now here is the beautiful part, which uses a trick I have found not everyone knows about. When you right click a tab in most of the browsers, you get a mini navigation menu. The menu choices aren’t always exactly the same for every browser (for example, Chrome lets you “duplicate” a tab where Opera offers the option to “clone”) but one choice you will almost certainly see is “Pin Tab”. When you choose to pin a tab it will be moved to the far left of all the tabs on your browser, and will remain there while you go about any other browser-related business. You will probably notice right away that a pinned tab does not have the little “x” next to it, so you won’t accidently close it. However many tabs you pin will stay running in your browser window, regardless of what else you are doing online. Please note that when you are actually in an open window from one of your pinned tabs it still works like any other browser window you use. So, if I have my Twitter account front and center, and I then type www.nytimes.com in the address bar, I will be taken to the New York Times website and away from Twitter. Also, if you move off of your home page in any of the Social Media accounts for example, if you reply to a LinkedIn message) and then close your browser entirely, when you re-open it the pinned tab may be the page you left and not your home page. It’s always a good idea to go home!

For many browsers, this is all you need to do to set up your dedicated tabs and keep them at the ready. In the case of Opera, I did have to make one extra change which involved making sure that I had checked the “continue where I left off” radio button in the Settings>Browser>On Start Up section of the Opera controls. You should check your own browser documentation to see if this additional step, or something similar, needs to be activated.

Now when I want to get down to business with Social Media accounts, I just open up Opera, do whatever reading and/or posting I choose (using Copy and Paste when I want to post similar messages to various places). When I’m done, I close Opera and go back to Google Chrome for my other web-based activities. Not only do I feel more organized, I am pretty sure I’m reducing the amount of RAM I am using to run all of these tools once I close the browser, which pays off in performance overall – multitaskers should appreciate that.

So, if you are like me and have found the multi-platform social media tools unsatisfying, confusing, or less useful than you had hoped, you  might want to try this workaround and see if you don’t have better results. Let me know your experience!