Our team has been allowed the unique opportunity to get to know some of the most impressive social media marketers in the industry, and as a result we have come to know the most impressive social media tools available. In addition, we have also been about to get a sneak peek into some of the up and coming tools and products around social media that not many professionals get. So, we have gathered a list of social media tools that have come highly recommended. If you aren’t using these social media tools, then you are truly missing out.

Social Media Tools:

1. Hootsuite
   Hootsuite is our most used tool out of all the the social media tools listed here. Hootsuite manages many social profiles including:
   Facebook (profiles, pages, and groups)
   Twitter
   Linkedin
   Foursquare
   Ping.fm
   Wordpress
   MySpace
   Mixi
   They also offer an abundance of analytics, scheduled messages (including the coveted bulk scheduler – scheduling up to 200 updates at once), and Klout integration. Hootsuite is also a great tool for monitoring brand mentions by setting up a search stream. If you see a question come through or a tweet/post that needs to be addressed by someone in your company, you can assign it to someone else. In fact team collaboration is the most popular feature among corporations with Hootsuite and social media marketing.
2. Klout

   Klout was originally presented at the 2011 Emerging Media Conference and has been growing in popularity ever since. Your Klout score is measured based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage in social media you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:True Reach: How many people you influenceAmplification: How much you influence themNetwork Impact: The influence of your network
   Your Klout score is already determined even before you sign up for Klout.com, but you can go to the website and login with either Facebook or Twitter and not only get your score, but you get a full detail of your social media personality (which has often been compared to a horoscope). Klout just recently rolled out their “Klout Perks” in which you can get free offers from Klout partners. Companies like Rapportive and Demandforce use Klout data to find influential customers and potential leads for social media marketing.

3. KnowEm
   KnowEm have been highly recommended by many of the speakers at Wappow! events, as well as in Jenn Mathews’ Post here on 11/8/2011 Building a Social Media Community. Knowem covers over 550 social media networks, and the USPTO Trademark Database for your brand. It’s a great way to get an idea of where a name is used before launching a new product, or grabbing your social media profiles for your brand before anyone else does. You can pay a small fee and they will go through and setup all the accounts for you, or you can go through and manage them yourself at no cost.
4. trunk.ly
   With trunk.ly you can keep track of links you shared through social media channels like Twitter. Many times we have found ourselves trying to remember that link we shared, or retweeted – and with trunk.ly we can always look them up quickly and easily. Users can also find the best links shared by an expert on a specific topic with their social search. Social search lets users search all the stored links, or just focus on links from a specific user.
   trunk.ly covers social media channels:
   Facebook
   Twitter
   Linkedin
   Quora
   HackerNews
   and more.
5. Diaspora
   Diaspora is a very private open source social network that puts the user in control of their own information.
   With Diaspora users can decide what they want to to share and who they want to share with, retaining full ownership of all information, including friend lists, messages, photos, and profile details. Marketers like to use it as a hub to manage all of their content and who they share that content with based on tags they setup around their audience’s demographic. To signup for a Diaspora account you can go to diasp.org/users/sign_up and get started.

So there you have our top 5 favorite social media tools. Of course there are so many more social media tools available, and we are learning about new ones every day. If you have a suggested tool please feel free to share it in the comments below, and tell Jenn why you like it for social media. Perhaps we can revisit this post in another few months or a year and see if the list has changed.

[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]