There are at least four widely used social media management apps now available: Hootsuite, Socialoomph, Tweetadder, and Tweetdeck. Each claim to offer you everything you need. But in practice, it doesn’t quite work that way. You have to choose which of the functions you want from each application. Here are the features of each app that can work well for managing all your social media activity.

And why not expand your footprint and choose with multiple tools? This also prevents you from becoming too dependent on one app provider. Plus, it gives you the all-important patient spread of scheduled tweets, which always need a prudent approach to avoid the dreaded Twitter deactivation. So let’s see how to get the best out of each tool.

1. Tweetadder – Allows you to schedule Twitter direct messages, but its real point of difference is finding multiple targets to follow, based on the keywords you select. A bit of geekery on the Twitterland API gets you thousands of goals. Then you can program how and when you continue, at what daily levels.

There may be a temptation to build 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 bursts of a few hundred targets at a time. Then see the relevance of who you are following and who is following you. There’s also a neat app to decide how long you wait to be followed, and unfollow if you’re not followed within the day limit you select.

2. Tweetdeck – Allows you to display multiple accounts together and select the content and fields you want to see. Not very innovative in our opinion.

3. Hootsuite – Allows you to display multiple accounts like tweetdeck, but on more social networks. Easy to retweet and track your direct messages. But there are two points of difference that we 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 to your followers, to your Facebook pages, etc. It’s very easy to add the page title, header, shortened URL, and often a thumbnail image as well, all with a single click of the hootlet button. You can then select the accounts in your Hootsuite lists that you want or don’t want to send page details to.

It even allows you to add some of your own text. And it has a box for you to add a secondary URL that you want to highlight for the viewer. It is ideal for multiple news tweets or new insights. But beware of two things that can get you banned from Twitter: One is using that secondary URL for a direct affiliate link or cloak. It’s better to use your own web page URLs and then redirect. The second thing to keep in mind is to re-edit a hootlet to highlight a high profile @username. And if you edit this back to the beginning, Twitter’s virtual police monitors will ban all your accounts on that hootlet. In a heartbeat, no appeal.

Therefore, it is better to use hootlets to spread a wide level of new content to your audience. And give due credit to the sources of the pages. Second, Hootsuite allows you to run scheduled distribution of tweets. It’s not easy to manage using Excel columns and deferring dates, but it can let you run important messages whenever you want.

4. Socialoomph – It doesn’t offer a very good search or very good account viewing interface, but it does have a wide range of innovative features, including several blogs. And it allows you to run large lists of tweets and Facebook messaging programs for much longer than Hootsuite.

Text files are also easier to set up. And they will compress long URLs for you in their software. Beware of using the same url (even shortened), in tweets scheduled for more than one account though. Twitter will block that tweet in all of its programs and, again, put that account at risk of deactivation. We prefer the Socialoomph URL shortening feature, because you can select your own new codename to use across your entire web footprint, thus staying close to your brand or theme.

But once again, use it for your own web pages and not just to cover up those volatile affiliate links. You can also set up email monitors to know when your accounts are favorited, retweeted, etc.

So it is worth investing in more than one service, under your monthly subscription fees. Be prepared to need a few more hours per week to stay on top of your shows, but it will be worth it to accelerate your entire social engagement strategy to a whole different level of impact and coverage.