Social media apps are fantastic and there are so many coming out for Twitter, not to mention the growing family of Facebook apps. Social media is an important part of any affiliate marketing strategy these days, and putting the energy it takes into doing Twitter and Facebook right takes a lot of time. Add that to the time you need to dedicate to your affiliate marketing program and networking and it’s hard to fit it all into the day.

Twitter apps like TweetDeck and SplitTweet do a great job managing your Twitter information and various Twitter accounts. A new app I came across is strong for social media in general, whether Twitter, Facebook, or any other social media outlet.

It’s called: AlertThingy (http://www.alertthingy.com/). The tagline is, “Your social desktop!” and that pretty much tells the story of what it does. The goal of AlertThingy is to bring all of your social media channels together for easier management and utilization. AlertThingy has the advantage of not taking up much space on your hard drive, so it doesn’t slow down the other programs you are running.

Basic features include sending Tweets, updating your Facebook status, posting photos to Flickr, read your RSS feeds, and connecting to other networks like Tumblr. It works with less widespread social media programs like Yammer, Basecamp and Huddle as well.

AlertThingy also bills itself as a way to avoid information overload—something we all have to work at on the Internet. AlertThingy has a filtering system that enables you to feature the data you are most interested in while managing all of your social media networks at once.

For anyone with an affiliate network to manage or for those of you who do affiliate program management, this desktop app is a great way to manage all of your incoming information and keep up with the immediate priority messages without missing out on the everything else.

You can find them on Twitter at @AlertThingy