10 Tools for Social Media
With up to 266 million Facebook users (O’Reilly Research) and around 44.5 million unique monthly Twitter visitors each month (comScore), it has become undeniable that social media is here to stay and can greatly impact the success of your business.
Contributing to the undeniable success of social media (especially Twitter) is the plethora of third party applications and tools. Below are some third party applications and tools you can use to better leverage social media for your business.
Lexicon:
Facebook’s Lexicon tool, the Google Trends of Facebook, allows you to see patterns for keywords in public places like walls and status updates. They have two versions of this tool, the latter being more robust. See if anyone is talking about your company, or you!
Twitterholic:
If you want to know the top 100 tweeters, this is the place to visit. Twitterholic scans twitter multiple times a day to keep us up to date on who has the most followers, tweets, their locations, number of updates and how long they’ve been a member. The list may surprise you.
Virtual Business Card:
There are many applications you can use to send a virtual business card, I have chosen just two. Simply create an account, customize your own business card and send your link to others via your social network of choice. Think of it as a more personal Outlook V Card.
Twitter Voicemail:
This tool allows you to leave a virtual Twitter voicemail. Sign up for an account and enter the name of the user you wish to leave a private voicemail for. Pockets will then call you, prompting you to leave a message. It then sends the private message via @ reply.
Link Shrink and Track:
These URL tracking tools are great for marketing initiatives. They shrink your URLs down so you can fit them into your 140 characters, or elsewhere, and even give you a report for clicks, locations, etc.
Posterous:
A new way to blog for those on the go, Posterous allows you to post to your blog via email. This is especially great for those interested in live blogging from their smart phones. You can even attach pictures and mp3s and use your own domain name.
Twellow:
Perhaps the most popular Twitter directory is Twellow, which was created by the folks at WebProNews. Twellow allows people to categorize themselves in the directory, add links, create an extended bio and follow others you find in Twellow.
File Sharing:
FileTwt allows you to tweet files (up to 20 MB) using your Twitter login and password. However, if you want to send files via private tweets, you must create an account.
Geographic Trends Map:
Twitter doesn’t yet (to see what’s in store, read here) allow for location targeting, so marketers trying to find followers locally can settle for something like the Trendsmap.
Seeing trending topics by geography can mean great implications for local businesses.
What the trend?
Perhaps my favorite of all the tools listed, What the trend? is great for people who never understand why Twitter trending topics are trending topics. This site shows a real time feed of trending topics and next to each is an explanation. You can even click through and read the tweets on the topic to piece it all together.