Tools for an Engaged Social Presence
I am always interested in finding the best and latest tools to enhance and expedite the social media experiences, maintenance and growth for Harp and for our clients.
Following is an abbreviated list of useful tools, resources and/or apps with links and short descriptions that you may want to incorporate into your daily social media practice. Though we obviously don’t use all of these, I have used a good many of them for different reasons.
Misc. Twitter Tools:
Provides a snapshot of your Twitter account including your latest tweets, who you talk to, your links, mentioned by, interests, stats and more.
Taweet (beta) is a social calendar and event promotion application for Twitter. Taweet adds a whole new dimension to your Twitter experience: the future. The casual format of Taweet allows users to answer one simple question, “What’s happening in the future?”…and search the future to see what others are doing.
Provides a snapshot of your social media presence.
Lets you back up your tweets, followers, favorites and more into a handy excel document.
Twitter Directories
Use these to as directories to submit your Twitter Account and to find relevant people to follow .
Known as the Twitter Yellow Pages, A search directory of people by area of expertise, profession or other attribute listed in personal profiles on Twitter.
Find people on Twitter with Listorious People Search! Follow @listorious on Twitter to be notified of more follow-worthy lists!
Tools for Sharing Content:
“Amplify is a service for engaging in conversation around web pages, paragraphs, images, videos or original ideas that make people think.”
Amplify integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Friendfeed and more so you can keep your friends and followers all over the web updated with you latest findings and invite them to discuss them with you.
Use HootSuite to publish content to multiple social media accounts and/or platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ping.fm (which pushes to many other platforms) and now they’ve just added WordPress functionality. Lets you set up columns which you can use to monitor twitter mentions of your brand. Columns are great to view pending tweets, sent tweets, create searches using keywords and even follow Twitter created lists & keyword searches. HootSuite features it’s own URL shortner ow.ly with stats. HootSuite also has a tool called Hootlet which you can drag to your bookmark bar and use to publish content to your selected platforms from anywhere on the web.
Like HootSuite, use it to create useful columns and connect with Twitter, Facebook & more.
Twhirl, like HootSuite and Tweetdeck is a social software desktop client and is useful for managing multiple twitter accounts.
Some of twhirl’s features:
- runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista/Win7) and Mac OSX
- connects to multiple Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic Video accounts
- displays notifications for new messages
- shorten long URLs (using digg.com, bit.ly, snurl, twurl or is.gd)
- cross-post your updates to Jaiku and many other sites likeFacebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and more via Ping.fm
- post images to yfrog
- search tweets using Twitter Search and TweetScan, and follow topics in near-real time with saved searches
- automatically find tweets mentioning your @username
Seesmic desktop integrates with both Twitter and Facebook and makes it easy to reply to your friends/fans and share texts, links, video & more.
OpenBeak is mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don’t need to use SMS. OpenBeak is the evolution of TwitterBerry, and gives a name that allows the app to grow beyond both the Twitter platform and BlackBerry smartphones.
Ping.fm is a simple and FREE service that makes updating your social networks a snap! Options to post content to 50+ social media sites and more!
Allows you to build a customized feed of made up of content your friends on other collaborative sites have shared, including news articles, photos and more. Read and share however you want — from your email, your phone or even from Facebook. Publish your FriendFeed to your website or blog, or to services you already use, like Twitter.
Features for Twitter include Auto Follow, Auto Unfollow. SocialToo also has Facebook featuers and anti-spam features.
Facebook to Twitter is a Facebook application which will automatically create a tweet of your Facebook updates and post onto Twitter with a link back to your Facebook page.
Fresh on the scene…Google Buzz is a stream reading and writing service. It will compete with Facebook and Twitter. The use of full email addresses in @ public replies demonstrated today seems to indicate that it will be a cross-platform messaging service. Facebook users can only message other Facebook users but Buzz users may be able to reply to people using email IDs from other networks. That’s hot stuff.
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Use this free tool to monitor your name, brand, business, competition, industry leaders, keywords, etc.
Google Reader constantly checks your favorite news sites and blogs for new content. Whether a site updates daily or monthly, you can be sure that you won’t miss a thing.Google Reader shows you all of your favorite sites in one convenient place. New: Today Google has rolled out a subtle change to Google Reader that lets you create custom feeds to track pages that don’t already have them. So you can subscribe to updates for any webpage simply by typing the URL into the “Add a subscription” text box.
A searchable index of blogs. Use this to find industry specific content from which to learn or to share.
Blog directory that can be used to search for interesting, popular or industry related blogs.
Alltop is a blog aggregator which can be searched by subject matter. You also have the ability to create your own, customized page and choose which blogs to pull into that.Use this to easily find industry news to share and learn from.
TwitThis is a social button to put on your website that helps promote your articles on twitter. TwitThis lets you easily share links with your friends, and find new followers.
ShareThis makes it easy to share ideas and get to the good stuff online. See why over 125,000 sites use ShareThis to increase traffic and engagement.
Promote your website or blog by using the tweetmeme button, a simple and easy way you can integrate Twitter into your blog and websites. Also can be used to find relevant content to retweet or share.
What’s your favorite tool or resource? Share it with us here.
Harp Social has the certified expertise, tools and social media acumen to take your SEO and social media marketing campaigns to the next level. Find out how we can help you use search marketing and social media more effectively for your business. Email or call 630.691.9500 today to get started today!
 |
Diane Rayfield is a Forbes Top 50 Social Media Power Influencer. Social Media Consultant, Strategist & Trainer. Founder of Harp Social. |
I see HelloTxt.com is missing. It’s very similar to Ping.fm but I’d say it’s better. And it’s made in Italy!
Thanks for adding HelloTxt.com Flavio…
Ciao!
Looks like you’re also missing Sendible.com. It’s also similar to Ping.fm, but lets you track your social media marketing efforts with powerful reporting and analytics.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by HarpInteractive: Social media tools, resources and apps! http://ow.ly/15CiC…
Hey Diane,
Having just read (and commented) on your timely Amplify submission about the Buzz Button plug-in I thought for sure I would see how you put it action but alas, I will have to come back tomorrow for the particulars on you embed the Buzz Button.
By the by, got an interesting email from Seesmic and Ping.fm guys on how they have integrated their offering with Buzz. More on this shortly.
- Neil