I love social media tools. They make everything I do easier, and in many cases, way more fun. Before the year’s end I wanted to share with you the Top 7 Social Media Tools I used frequently in 2011. I can’t wait to see what great tools arrive on the social media scene in 2012!
1. I love to write, but even for me it can be a challenge to find great content that will help make my posts rich with relevant resources and outbound links. Zemanta is a Chrome extension I installed that grabs related articles for me. See “Related articles” in this post? That’s Zemanta, baby! It couldn’t be an easier social media tool to use.
2. Likefox makes it our business to know when something is being said about a person or brand we’re managing. If it’s a positive statement, that’s fantastic. If not, we need to know immediately so that we can rush to remedy any problem. Social Mention is one of the tools in our extensive arsenal that we use to help us monitor the social media landscape for our clients. It’s certainly not the only tool you’ll need to manage your social media reputation, but it’s a solid one to drop in your toolbox.
3. I love Tweetdeck. I can quickly and easily switch between all the Twitter accounts we manage so that we can engage with followers without logging in and out of different Twitter accounts. They also have an extension for your browser.
4. Buffer App rests in your browser like a crouching tiger of awesomeness ready to help you share all the great resources you uncover online to your hungry social media audience. When I stumble onto something that I think our Likefox audience would find interesting, all I have to do is click the Buffer App icon in Chrome (also available for other browsers), and it grabs the link and holds it until a time I’ve scheduled to post it to Twitter and/or Facebook. I love it. You’ll love it, too.
5. Friend or Follow is an old standby that I still use to find out who I’m following on Twitter that isn’t following me back. You may be surprised to find that people you interact with frequently still aren’t following you.
6. I value real followers over “fake” ones any day. That may seem like a pretty obvious thing to say, but you’d be surprised at how often some of the folks you see with a massive number of Twitter followers inflate that number with followers who are nothing more than spam accounts. Nest Unclutterer is a cool tool that will look over my followers and help me blow up the spammers and stop following accounts who haven’t tweeted in more than 30 days.
7. Twitalyzer allows me to improve the targeting of tweets on behalf of a brand or person. Twitalyzer knows who is in your social network and where the live, allowing you to be more targeted in your outreach efforts.
What were your favorite social media tools of 2011?
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