Social Media Marketing Tools: 8 Picks

New social media marketing tools seem to pop up every day, so here’s some help sorting the best from the rest:

  1. MENTION: Google Alerts for the social web. MENTION helps you monitor your brand’s presence on social networks, forums, blogs and more.  It also includes social features that allow you to respond to mentions of your brand and to share industry news that you find.
  2. BUFFER: Social media publishing plus powerful analytics. BUFFER is a powerful social media tool that lets you schedule your updates to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and App.net.
  3. FEEDLY: Content discovery. Finding great content to share with your audience is easy with FEEDLY.  Not only can you subscribe to RSS feeds to keep on top of industry blogs and news sites, you can also use FEEDLY to discover new content related to your topics of interest.
  4. TWITTER COUNTER: Track Twitter progress. It’s easy to lose track of how your Twitter account is growing; that’s where TWITTER COUNTER comes in.  It’s a free service that tracks changes in your follower count and predicts future growth over time.
  5. ZAPIER: Link favorite social services. ZAPIER connects the services you use independently.  For example, if your team uses HipChat to keep in touch, you can use ZAPIER  to set up automatic notifications inside HipChat rooms for Tweets, MailChimp campaigns or new RSS items.
  6. BOTTLENOSE: Intelligence for social networks. BOTTLENOSE features a real-time search engine that queries all public information from social networks and groups and displays it in algorithmic order of importance.  The result is a stream of content ranked by most to least important.
  7. FOLLOWERWONK: Follower analysis for Twitter. Although you can use a tool like Twitter Counter to watch the growth of the number of your Twitter followers, you may need to analyze your followers more carefully.  FOLLOWERWONK breaks down your followers into demographics so you can understand them better.
  8. QUINTLY: Social analytics for brands. QUINTLY is a powerful tool for in-depth social media analytics, helping you track your business’s social media performance on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram.  QUINTLY also has benchmarking features that help you understand how your performance compares to that of competitors and to industry averages.