Yay, Bottlenose! Social media app saves drowning writers from a sea of constant status updates

Using the Bottlenose app feels just like this.

Come up for air and enjoy social networking again!

Looking for real-time results on what your network is talking about, but don't want to spend an hour surfing the feed? Same here.

So I checked out Bottlenose, a social media app that reads your Facebook and Twitter feed and lets you know what topics are popular.

How does it do that? With real-time Sonar, an interactive visual way to see your network's trending topics, people and more. It even shows you how these topics relate to each other and lets you click on each topic to really delve into what people are chatting about. Next to the Sonar graph are the related messages in your social sphere.

How does Bottlenose help writers?

In multiple ways--from social to promotion. Now you don't have to waste time finding someone
to talk to. You can join an ongoing conversation. Simply set Bottlenose to 'Now,' click a topic you think looks interesting and look to the status updates on the left to see who is saying what. Interact away!

For promotion, the read the Sonar in much the same way and promote your writing when the topic comes up. This sounds haphazard, but if you take the time to notice what everyone talks about at certain times of the day (I take screen shots, instead of relying on memory) and use Buffer or Hootsuite to schedule appropriate posts during those times.

Hint: Buffer will schedule for the peak usage times for your network. That will increase the visibility, and hopefully the shares, of your posts.

The picture above is an example from my networks today. I can see that social media and SEO were popular this morning. Social media, sports and writing are popular in the afternoon. By tonight, politics will be popular, as well as the previous topics, plus trending news and entertainment will show up.

At least that's what I've noticed so far. I'm still grabbing data from different days/times, but it is already forming a fairly consistent pattern.

Chances are your network revolves around topics you already write about or you have a bunch of writers as friends. So the app will be able to give you article ideas as you delve into topics. Now that's a win!

Look at all the chatter for today! Wow. Glad I now have a way to make it manageable.

I'm still going to tweet other stuff when the mood strike--hey, someone starts those conversations--but I'm going to try it this way.You can also post to Twitter and Facebook from Bottlenose and it has Hootsuite-style streams you can set up to follow or analyze.

Check out Klout perks to see if you qualify for an invitation to use Bottlenose.

Who's already using this app?  Going to try it out?