The explosion of social media in the last few years has brought with it a whole slew of social media applications and tools designed to help publicists deliver and monitor better results. As I have written before, I think social media has been a huge help for publicity. However, choosing the tools is important in helping you save time and be effective. I've compiled a list of 12 tools that lighten the social media workload at FSB, and I hope you find them helpful as well.
Blog Searches:
- Blogpulse: You can search for a URL, name or topic. I think it gives good results for a given topic, even though I'm not always crazy about the results. However, every now and then I find things here that are missed by Google or Google alerts.
- Google Blog Search: This is the most thorough blog searching tool around. You can find blogs for any topic.
- Technorati: This is a great site of blogs by topic and ranking. Very helpful.
Digital Presence Assessment and Management:
- Addictomatic: This site is very helpful in gauging a digital footprint as it searches the web for latest news, blog posts, videos and images. A cool element is that you can customize the dashboard by simply dragging the boxes around.
- Hootsuite: We use Hootsuite in the office and even pay for the pro version. I think it is an excellent program that we find more reliable than Tweetdeck. You can manage several accounts and schedule posts for Twitter and Facebook.
- How Socialable: This site gives you an evaluation of your brand's visibility. It's not great for personal brands, but a good tool for big brands, like your company.
- Klout: One of the most popular Twitter popularity tools, Klout measures influence rather than just followers.
- Social Mention: This site allows you to search an author, company or topic across the Web. You can get results from 100 social media sites in one place. My favorite part is that it gives you sentiment (positive, neutral or negative) of the mentions all over the Web, along with top keywords and top hashtags. It's handy.
- TweetReach: This is one of my favorite sites. It allows you to search a topic, author, handle or name and see how many people were reached by those Tweets. You can also see who sent the Tweets and how many followers they have. Very helpful for publicists looking for influencers.
- TwitterCounter: I love this site. It allows you to see the Twitter stats for any handle. You can see if the trend is for gaining followers or losing them. Also shows you how many Tweets are made everyday by any handle. Good for research and for monitoring the success of your company feeds.
Topic Search:
- Google Trends: If you are working on a news topic, this is an excellent source as it gives you insights into the traffic and geographic visit patterns.
- Twazzup: This site allows you to filter news from live Twitter content. It's good to see trending topics and influencers for a given subject. Better for topic than an author's name.
Having a social media platform for communicating is extremely important for the success of your publicity campaigns. The majority of the tools presented in this list can make communicating your messages on target and easy to manage/track. I invite you to choose the ones that help make your social media experience more productive and better still, enjoyable. Do you have a favorite tool not on this list?
© 2011 Fauzia Burke. All Rights Reserved.
Fauzia Burke is the Founder and President of FSB Associates, a publicity and website development firm specializing in creating awareness for books and authors on the web. For web publicity and social media news, follow Fauzia on Twitter: @FauziaBurke
Follow Fauzia Burke on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/FauziaBurke
Keep in mind... along with posting to multiple social profiles, HootSuite allows you to manage complex campaigns with publishing & scheduling tools, plus helps prevent gaffes with security features, and analyze your results with deep social/web analytics.
This is an exciting time for small businesses how suddenly have the ability to reach an large audience with relatively small investment in tools or time.
I would like to add little insight about our Brand Monitoring Tool.
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This tool allows you to View the overall Trend and Download the data on Excel Format, Overall Sentiment of the Brand, Map Overlay of mentions and conversations, Individual Channel's Report and Advance Filter Option Available, User can view the trend in sentiments and compare between negative and positive trend and many other Insights.
Thanks
Kavya Kundalia Bisht
Community Manager, Simplify360
There is a need for a portal to provide a quick and intelligent decision for both the consumer and the enterprise about their online connections. A Platform to Help us to Distinguish Our Quality vs. Quantity Friends, Fans, Followers, and Companies.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Flickr and others have been doing a decent job of providing additional marketing exposure and even in some cases, additional revenue. However, as more social networking sites pop up, the task of picking the right channel getting more challenging.
This reminds me of the early 90’s when WWW was adopted broadly by the general public. Every company rushed to have a presence, to the point it became literally impossible to find the right information on the Web. That’s when yahoo and google where born and helped us find the most relevant information by just typing simple keywords.
Then came Web 2.0 – myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc have turned everyday people into content producers, influencers and experts. We basically tripled down on the information overload How do you know which channels to select for deploying your social media strategy? That is why I built awesomize.me to accomplish such a mission - the portal to all your existing social media channels.
Elias
CEO & Founder
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