Do you want to widen your own social media footprint without consuming any more of your important time? Whether you are a web profits or internet marketing professional, or if you simply want to organize your own Facebook, Twitter and Blogging messages, posts and uploads more efficiently, to save time, there are a number of management software applications that can help you. So far, none of these applications can qualify as the complete one-stop-solution for every service. So you have to often purchase and run two, or more of them. How do you choose which application will give you the ideal support action and services that you want?

There are at least four widely used applications now available - Hootsuite, Socialoomph, Tweetadder and Tweetdeck. Each claim to offer everything you need. But in practice, it does not quite work out that way. You need to cherry pick which of the functions you want from each application. So set out here are the functions from each applications that can work well to manage all of your social media activity.

And why not extend your footprint with a number of tools? This also stops you from too much reliance on one application provider. Plus it gives you the all-important patient spread of programmed tweeting, which always needs a prudent approach to avoid the dreaded Twitter De-Activation. So let's look at how to get the best from each tool?

1. Tweetadder - let's you program Twitter direct messages but their real point of difference is a search for multiple targets to follow, based on the keywords that you select. Some great geekery into the Twitterland API gets you thousands of targets. Then you can program how and when you follow, at what daily levels. There can be a temptation to create a huge target list unless you are really limited with your keywords. It's actually much better to do this for one keyword, in small burst of a few hundred targets at a time. Then see the relevance of whom you are following and who follows back. There is also a neat app to decide how long you wait to be followed - and unfollow if you are not followed back within a day limit that you select.

2. Tweetdeck - let's you display a number of accounts together and select the contents and fields that you want to view. Not very innovative in our opinion.

3. Hootsuite - let's you display multiple accounts like tweetdeck, but across more social media. Easy to retweet and track your direct messaging. But there are two points of difference we absolutely love about Hootsuite. First is the 'Hootlet' that you paste into your browser bar. This allows you to capture a web page that you want to tweet out to your followers, onto your Facebook pages, etc. It is very simple to add the page title, heading, reduced url and often a thumbnail visual too - all with one click on your hootlet button. Then you can select the accounts in your Hootsuite lists that you do or don't want to send details of the page to. It even let's you add some of your own text. And it has a box for you to add a secondary url that you want to highlight to the viewer. It's great for multiple tweeting of news or new insights. But beware of two things that can get you banned from Twitter - one is using that secondary url to a direct affiliate link or cloak. Better to use your own web page urls and then re-direct. The second thing to beware of is re-editing a hootlet to highlight a high profile @username. And if you put this in a re-edit at the beginning, Twitter's virtual police monitors will ban all your accounts in that hootlet. In a heartbeat, without appeal. So better to use hootlets to spread a broad level of new content to your audience. And give due credit to the sources of the pages. Second, Hootsuite lets you run programmed distribution of tweets. It's not easy to manage using excel columns and differing the dates, but it can let you run important messages when you choose.

4. Socialoomph - this is our preferred solution. It does not give you very good search applications, or much of an account-viewing dashboard facility, but it has a wide range of innovative functions, including multiple blogging. And it let's you run very long lists of tweets and Facebook message programmes, for far longer than Hootsuite. The text files are much easier to set up too. And they will compress long urls for you, in their software. Beware of using the same url (even if it is shortened), in scheduled tweets, for more than one account though. Twitter will block that tweet across all your programmes and, again, you put that account at risk to de-activation. We love the cool Socialoomph function to shorten your urls, because you can select your own new codename to use across your entire web footprint and therefore stay close to your brand or subject. But, once again, use it for your own web pages and not to just veil over those volatile affiliate links. You can also set up special email advice, so you know when your accounts are favourited, re-tweeted etc.

So it's worth investing in more than one service, under their monthly subscription rates. Be prepared to need a few more hours per week to stay on top of your programmes, but it will be worth it, to accelerate your whole social interaction strategy to an entirely different level of impact and coverage.