As you are all well aware, I’m a strong believer in social media. However I’ll be the first to admit it can often be time consuming to post to various social networks especially if you’re trying to keep up with both personal and professional contacts. I sometimes find myself logging in and out of 3 different twitter accounts in a day. But there is an easier way.

There’s this little thing called a social media dashboard. You may have heard of Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, they’re the dashboards I speak of and they can save a lot of time.

Overall Benefits:

• Social network streams from multiple accounts all in one place.
• The built in ability to shorten links. A definite plus for those prolific on Twitter.
• The ability to have your current feed, mentions, direct messages, and searches (among other things) open at the same time.
• My personal favorite, a way to schedule posts. That way you can be away from the computer and still be a part of the conversation.

These dashboards are all about management of multiple accounts in one place. You can customize your dashboard to include the areas you want to keep tabs on the most, regular searches, mentions, your tweets retweeted, and so on. Most of the dashboards let you manage more than just Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Foursquare are often accepted platforms.

For general exploring, looking to find new people to follow, or joining in on new conversations I recommend going directly to Twitter or Facebook instead of using the dashboards. Many of the bells and whistle features are unavailable.

There are a few services out there, but so far only 3 have really stood out to me, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and Socialblaze. All are free or at least have a free version so you can try them all to decide for yourself, but I’ll give you a quick rundown of what I like and don’t like about each.

Hootsuite was my hands down favorite until they decided to add a pro paid account. While still a reasonable expense, $6/month, in addition to adding great new features it limited some existing features on the free account. The biggest change being that you can only follow 5 social media profiles with the free version. For most this isn’t a big deal, but if you’ve got personal and business Facebook and Twitter accounts you can get to five pretty quickly. On the good side the have a clean interface that’s pretty intuitive. You can track clicks on your links, post across multiple networks, add photos and video, and follow conversations all in one place.

Tweetdeck is the other major player in the field. While not as clean an interface as Hootsuite you do have more access, especially to Twitter. Facebook doesn’t integrate as well though; you can post to business pages, but can’t keep track of the wall posts. And in the “I can’t decide if it’s a pro or con” column, you download the software as opposed to logging in to a website.

And lastly the new kid on the block, Socialblaze, which is still in public beta. Socialblaze is more about analytics, the tracking capabilities rival google analytics, than keeping up on conversations, although you might say they are more or less the same thing. But because of the heavy analytics it takes a while to set up. You import all your accounts and then it takes up to a day to analyze all the data. However you can get to posting right away if you’re anxious. In addition to the standard features of the other dashboards you can create tasks and set up a whole calendar within the interface.

Because I’m such a geek with the numbers I can see Socialblaze being the standout for me. However for just straight usability I still think Hootsuite is the winner and if you’re willing to pay the $6/month, you’ve got all you need and more.