In the past few years many companies and individuals are starting to get their feet wet in social media marketing. It can be difficult to manage and keep up with the all the tweets, diggs, posts, updates and shouts.
To help monitor and stay connected with your social media efforts, we’ve compiled this list of 7 great tools that can help you do more with social media in less time. Most of these tools are also a good way to stay organized and will ultimately make you a better friend to your social media buddies.
1) BackType
URL: http://www.backtype.com/
BackType is a conversational search engine that indexes and connects millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments. One of the most useful features is BackType Subscriptions sends you e-mail updates whenever someone comments on a post you specify.
2) Minggl
URL: http://www.minggl.com/
Minggl is what’s called a social interaction manager and their toolbar makes it easy to manage information, communication, and navigation across (and independent of) social networks. Minggl works as a browser extension to Firefox and Internet Explorer and it adds a “relationship layer” across all your sites. One of the best features is their Status Blaster which allows you to update your status across multiple social networks from one place.
3) Flock
URL: http://www.flock.com/
The Flock browser is designed to complement exciting social services. It utilizes their People Sidebar, allowing you to instantly interact with your friends on Digg, AOL, Gmail, Picasa, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Del.icio.us, Truveo, MySpace and many others.
4) Social Mention
URL: http://www.socialmention.com/
Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services. They also provide a feed API for developers to access search results in several different formats.
5) Social Media for Firefox
URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7888
Social Media for Firefox shows the number of Diggs, Reddit Votes, Stumble Thumbs and or Reviews, and Del.icio.us tags, Tweets, Sphinns, Mixx, and Tip’d votes so you can quickly see how popular certain content is. It can also scan said social sites to show you what content hasn’t been submitted to other social news sites so you can be the first to add it. This can be a great tool and help you save time on Digg and Reddit.
6) TwitterFox
URL: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5081
This FireFox extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar that notifies you when your friends update their status. Also it has a small text input field to update your status.
7) PostRank
URL: http://www.postrank.com/
PostRank provides detailed information on Tweets, stumbles, diggs, and FriendFeed all in a convientant single place. It can help by continuously monitoring RSS feeds, finding the good stuff, and then creating a PostRank Score for each item to help filter the information to you.
Ryan Smith was the former Director of Operations for McKremie.
