Just when I think that the world of social media has settled down – that I understand the linkages, measurements, approaches and benefits – something new comes along to upset my apple cart. That means that I am constantly juggling old with new, testing and learning and attempting to map past successes against new tools and techniques.
This is, in part, why we see lots of “5 tips” or “10 must haves” style articles. Constantly.
But I have noticed recently that many of these articles talk about the “100 best” or “99 favourite” tips, tools or techniques. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time for 99 or even 100 anythings. But I do have time for five.
So I thought I’d share with you the five generally free social media tools that I use everyday. And if you have a moment, drop a comment below and tell me about your favourites too!
- SocialMention – as a general purpose social media monitoring solution, it’s pretty good. It comes with decent analytics, sentiment analysis and even RSS feeds.
- Topsy – want to know more about who, what and trends? This is where Topsy comes in.
- Google AdPlanner – what’s currently going on in the world of your contestable keywords? Digging around in the beastly AdPlanner can let you know what you are up against
- Posterous – even with its uncertain future (just been purchased by Twitter), Posterous is an awesome aggregating and distribution tool. You can bring content in and you can have Posterous auto-post out to many others. It’s your social media BFF
- Tweetreach – no doubt you want to measure your efforts, right? Tweetreach have just launched a new infographic-style reporting engine that tells you just how far, how quickly and how/who pushed your hashtag into the viral stratosphere.
But let's take this a step further … maybe we should use some social media tools to keep track of these and others! So here's a list that you can use: