Highlight posts of the key people you follow

For those of you who prefer to use just one social platform for your social media activity, then the likes of Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Buffer and Commun.it still have their place. Hootsuite, for example, allows you to set up separate, bespoke columns to help manage things like Twitter Lists, mentions, specific search terms, hashtags, Facebook pages and other social platform criteria.

If you happen to follow several people on any given platform, the activity streams can be continually moving and you can miss important posts, tweets and other updates.

But what you can do in some dashboards, like TweetDeck, is segment who you follow. For example, you can profile into a stream all of the "bloggers", "top readers", "buddies", "journalists", etc., and have them in a dashboard column of their own. This makes them easier to track and, where required, engage with - which, of course is almost impossible in platforms like Twitter, where updates are constant and the window for seeing them can be very small.