I recently read about Postling being used by companies as a dashboard tool to monitor the latest conversations across the major channels the companies are engaged on. The tool is free and I setup an account to give it a try while simultaneously asking those on my blog’s Facebook page what they thought of the tool. Sometimes, just sometimes, you receive so much information that it becomes time to turn that feedback into a guest post. This was one of those times…

Mike Whaling, of 30lines.com, responded with feedback that matched my observations,and with feedback that can only be obtained by using the product for longer than a typical evaluation cycle. Here, in the words of our guest reviewer, are some thoughts on Postling.

“I’ve been using Postling for a while, and I’m mostly pleased with it. It tracks replies to tweets and Facebook page updates well, although it’s not in real-time. The keyword tracking is OK, but this also isn’t quite in real time. I haven’t tried the blogging features yet; I’m primarily using it to post to and monitor social media sites.

It’s easy to add brands and link your accounts. Replies to comments on Facebook and Twitter are a breeze.

Being able to monitor reviews on Yelp and CitySearch in the same place is incredibly handy, too. The support from the Postling team has been great, and they’re all easy to find on Twitter.

All that said, there’s plenty of room for improvement. There’s no easy way to search your dashboard or save posts for later action, and you can’t manage followers or lists from within the app. You only see tweet and replies directed at your brand, so it’s much like CoTweet in that respect. (I find a lot of value in monitoring the stream, looking for items to retweet or share to my Facebook pages.) Some of the features aren’t as intuitive as they could be, and I’d like to see it connect with LinkedIn and a few other sites. There’s also not a mobile-optimized version of the site or smartphone app, yet.

All in all, I much prefer Postling to the majority of alternatives, but it still requires a second tool like Tweetdeck or Seesmic for full access to all the social tools I’m looking for at this point.

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I’m using Postling to monitor my page at http://www.facebook.com/30lines, so feel free to direct your readers there if you want to give them a feel for what the updates look like when posted through the app. I look forward to reading the full review!

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One point to add that I just realized: there’s no way to manage direct messages on Twitter. Again, this is easy enough to handle through Tweetdeck, but it doesn’t really make sense to have a Twitter monitoring tool that can’t monitor DMs.”

Mike, thanks for being a guest reviewer.

John