Android Apps for Social Networking

When you are out and about and inspiration strikes, you just have to share it with your friends on your favorite social network! With Android Apps, you can now stay connected to your network wherever you go.

The top apps for the social media enthusiast are of course, the official free apps for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare etc. Facebook, the world’s most popular networking site, has Facebook for Android, which offers all the features of the web version, including sharing photos and messages and keeping up with your friends’ status updates. With the latest update, performance and responsiveness has improved drastically. With the official Twitter app for Android you can tweet, retweet, favorite, direct message, browse, follow and real time search tweets. If location based social check-in is your thing, the two biggies in that space, Foursquare and Gowalla have official apps. Check-in from anywhere with your mobile device and get notified of friends and discounts or deals available near you.

LinkedIn is here to stay as a professional networking tool. To access your LinkedIn profile, inbox, contacts or groups on your Android device, you can choose between the official LinkedIn client and the DroidIn client. Whatever your latest social network of choice, be it Pinterest, the lesser known GetGlue for media buffs or Untappd for beer drinkers, there are official and unofficial full-featured apps out there to help you connect on the go. Another must-mention app in this context is AppBrain, the app that helps you network and find - other Android apps! It works by connecting with your Twitter or Facebook account, checking if any of your friends there use AppBrain and recommending from the list of apps they use.

Individual apps for each social network are fine for most, but it simply won’t do the job for the determined social media addict, who is forever cross posting his tweet to his facebook timeline and keeping tabs on what all his friends and contacts on different social networks are up to. For such enthusiastic social media buffs, there are Android apps like TweetDeck, Seesmic and HootSuite which bring several social networks under one cool interface. Seesmic supports multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts; TweetDeck integrates Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Buzz, while HootSuite supports multiple Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare accounts. All of them share great features like refreshing your social feeds automatically and allowing you to post to different networks from a single interface. Hootsuite has an advantage in terms of offering a clean uncluttered interface and statistics about your social media pages.