Bottlenose: the Social Media Manager
I was invited to be a Beta 3 tester for Bottlenose. Maybe that means my work will be easier since this is the third round of user testing. My preference is to be in round 1 of beta testing, but hey…
Bottlenose is a social media manager. It is supposed to help you manage the flow rather than be overwhelmed by it. At this time it is web based only, so no mobile. They say they are working on that.
This is the ‘Welcome’ screen once you log in.
They take you through a guided tour to get you familiar with their user interface.
I love how they did this introduction! Kudos to whoever did it!
So far my experience has been mixed. When I first load the site it takes a considerable amount of time. I watch progress bars as they load messages. I tried eliminating some of the streams I was monitoring. That was of minimal help. Once it completes the initial load it stays updated nicely.
You can choose from 3 different views – Reader, Sonar, and Newspaper.
The Reader view is the typical stream you would see from your Twitter account. You can also choose to display by Time, Popularity, or Relevance.
The Sonar view looks like sonar as you can see by the screen shot. It shows you what’s trending in any given stream.
Newspaper view lets you read everything as if it was a newspaper.
You can view one particular filter or stream like ‘Tech News’, or you can choose to see ‘All’.
You also have the choice to display ‘Main’. This presents everything stored within it as columns to the right of your ‘All’ column. You scroll side to side to view the column you want to see. Personally I find this view just too much. If I want to view Mentions, I will just choose that one item. The whole point is to reduce the overwhelming clutter to a more manageable work space.
You do not have advanced options yet, like for scheduling Tweets. Right now it is still in beta and still free. I believe the plan is to come out of beta later this year with paid options introduced.
They have do have excellent tutorial information you can access from within the ‘Help’ button at the upper right corner.
http://bottlenose.com/
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Once you have tried it let me know what you think…
Filed in: Blogging • social media • Technology
Thanks for the honest review of Bottlenose. I had not heard of this tool before. I find that sometimes tools that are designed to help us actually take a lot of time to implement. It will be interesting to see if they take feedback like yours and are able to tweak their product into a tool that will meet the needs of time-crunched bloggers.
I had downloaded this awhile back and had not found it to be as useful as I had hoped. It will be interesting to see what they do with it in the near future.
Like Sherryl I had never heard about Bottlenose before.
Seems we all agree that this tool will not be adopted by many users unless they listen to the feed-back from you and others. I, for one, will not use it.