Todaypulse: Your Social Media Inbox

Social Media is like a bull in the China shop. It’s powerful and is uncontrollably wild. People who complain about email overload should take peek at the plight of a social media consultant and consider themselves blessed. Every hour on the hour, the flow of information exponentially increases and processing it requires top notch apps.

Todaypulse offers an easy way to manage your social media marketing and create conversations with your customers.

Overview

Todaypulse helps you save a lot of time with a single log in for all of your accounts. With this web app it’s now so easy to engage in the conversation that you’ve been missing and make social marketing a regular part of your day. Signing up for the service didn’t take long and there is no need for submitting credit card information.

Pricing

From a single login account to team accounts and white labelled services, Todaypulse has plans for companies of all sizes. The plans start at $24 a month. All premium accounts come with a 14 day free trial period.

Apart from the SaaS pricing plans, Todaypulse offers social media consulting and analytics services too. For a fee, you can gain access to a monthly one-on-one social media assessment with a Todaypulse social media expert.

Dashboard

Without the need for email activation, the app will take you straight to the Dashboard aka. Inbox. Since I just opened a brand new account, there is nothing to comment here yet, so let us proceed to adding a couple of social media accounts from the prominently displayed Get Started Now button.

Ease of Use

At present you can integrate your accounts from the following three networks – Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. Given the fact that beyond these three services ther isn’t much of the social happening, absence of Tumblr and YouTube could be ignored.

As usual, I opted to integrate my Twitter account at first. The integration happens via OAuth without the need for submitting your login credentials with Todaypulse. Integrating the Facebook account was hassle free as well. As soon as you allow the app access to your account, you are good to go.

If you happen to have multiple Facebook accounts, the app will prompt you to choose the right one. You can also add multiple accounts from the other social networks too.

Accessing the Inbox

The Todaypulse inbox is a thing of beauty. It is designed like an email inbox and to be precise, more like a desktop based email client. If you have been accustomed to constant vertical flow of updates in a regular social media client, this experience would be very refreshing.

From here, you can reply or comment to all of your social networks, approve WordPress comments, and publish blog posts without ever leaving the application. It’s just not built like an email inbox, but messages are displayed like emails too. When you select a message, you will see the sender (just like an email header) and all his profile information. Then there is the message in the body followed by a space for you to send a reply just like the way you reply an email.

Publishing Updates

From the Publish screen, you can push updates to an unlimited number of Twitter and Facebook accounts from one powerful interface. There is a separate editor for each social network. For example, the Tweet window is pretty standard looking, while the WordPress account has a WYSIWYG editor. The editors leverage the strengths from each network, so that you always get the maximum results. If you have multiple accounts of the same social network, use the drop down button to select the right one and the publish away.

The web app keeps a record of all published messages and if your are managing a team that is engaging with your audience, you will know exactly where each member left off and others can take it from there.

Engaging Your Audience

The Engage section of the app is all about your social media mentions. From here you can stay on top of what people are saying about your brand and how flattering they actually are. The engage section works the same way as the Inbox and Publish sections  and you can reply or initiate a conversation without leaving this page.

Another interesting aspect of the Engage section is the presence of tabs. You can create a tab and tuck away conversations or searches by topic. While there is no way you can access multiple tabs simultaneously, you can switch between them with ease.

Tabs can be of great help to stay on top of news and keywords. From a tab you can do three things. First, use it to search for track keywords. Second you can search for questions from Twitter, Yahoo Answers and Answers from Business.com. Finally, you can subscribe to RSS feeds of your chocie and keep yourself updated with news from non real time sources.

Final Thoughts

Managing social media could be very distracting. But with Todaypulse, you get everything you need to get your social mojo going. The app is designed to perfection and is easy for anyone to start using it in a matter of minutes. The plans are a bit on the pricier side though. While it might not be right to compare with services like Hootsuite, Todaypulse could consider coming up with an economy plan for casual users.

Share Your Thoughts!

What is your take on aggregating social media accounts? Will you give Todaypulse a try?