Top 10 Social Media Tools You Can Use To Pump Your Network

Jeff Bullas in his informative post 20 Stunning Social Media Statistics, reports that 1 in every 9 people on earth is on Facebook. Over 30 billion content pieces are shared on Facebook each month. Each user spends an average of 15 hours 33 minutes a month on Facebook alone.

Twitter, on the other hand, handles 1.6 billion queries while adding more 500,000 users per day. Google + has about 25 million users already and is reportedly the fastest social network to reach 10 million users.

Admittedly, social media is in. This is the era of Interaction. People like you, get influenced by you, swear by your content, and link to you. Traditional marketing just got whipped. Here are some incredibly useful tools you can use to pump up your performance on Social Media and get more from it.
Social Bro

Social Bro

Twitter is all about conversations on a strict diet. Between millions of little nuggets of information being passed from one to all, and then one to many, converging to one-to-one, Twitter is finally where you will begin to create your network.

To gain a massive following on Twitter, just being there isn’t enough. You’ll need to manage your network actively. SocialBro does just that for you. It helps you gain accurate information about your followers using search criteria. Know who influences you, and interact with them efficiently.

It also has other features where you can back-up your contacts, hunt down potential spammers and kick them out of your system, track your network to find out if there are any inactive users, discover influential Twitter users and connect with them, manage your lists, follow/unfollow easily, communicate lighting fast, spot your network on a map, discover the best times to tweet during the day, and create tag clouds. It’s free and it’s awesome.

EdgeRank Checker

Edgerank Checker is a Facebook centric tool that helps you to gain a competitive edge using Facebook. Using an algorithm that ranks your content, objects within your Facebook news feed, and other such variables. It shows you how you are pegged against the industry you operate in, your likes, comments, post frequency and plenty of other such variables. Think of this as “facebook insights on steroids” [Cliched, but gets the point across]

Kred

At first glance, Kred looks like it’s competing with Klout. While I am fairly addicted to Klout, I feel that Kred as a refreshing and a new way of measuring your “Kred”. When I decided to check it out myself, the snapshot below shows where I stand.

How Kred Works

In terms of “Influence” and “Outreach”, Kred displays an overview. Further, when you check the activity tab, it shows a detailed report of your activity on Twitter and guide on how to increase your Kred score. Also, you can add your offline Cred too. Say, you are a CEO, author, Celebrity, etc. You can add this to your Kred Score.

In short, I loved it. Now, I am addicted to both Klout and Kred – unable to decide which one is better than the other.

Tweet Cloud

Think of it as a “Break time Value Added tool”. After say a weeks of Tweeting and Retweeting, you might want to see what your tweets were about really. Remember the tag cloud while using WordPress? TweetCloud digs up your past 200 tweets or so and comes up with a cloud and lives up to the promise of showing me stuff I didn’t expect. See my cloud below:

My tweet cloud Sample

Guess what? I have a stupid habit of saying, “Rocking” all the time and that showed up. I retweet some Twitter users more often  (partly because they are friends or clients or both). Since I do a lot of Technology ghost blogging on “Cloud”, that showed up too.

Pretty cool for a minute of your time, eh?

Think Up

Think Up

Going by the credo “Understand Your Social Networks”, Think Up is an open-source web application that pulls in all your activity from major social media networks such as twitter, Facebook, and Google +. Although it might not be for a complete beginner, it’s an incredibly powerful application that you can download and then use it as a dashboard for all of your social activity.  Search for people in your network, embed your conversations within your website, analyze using powerful graphs and features, and much more.

Who else can explain it better that the folks from Think Up? Check out this video for a short explanation:

Site Trail

Site Trail

My granny used to say, “If you don’t measure, your goals will suffer from a seizure”.  Creating websites, writing content, screaming out aloud while marketing, and showing up on media is on thing. To measure it all is another.

Site trail helps you measure. It provides you a complete system to analyze everything about your website – your links, your website’s SEO status, and much more. While it isn’t specifically a “Social Media” tool, it does have a module for Social media analysis. It’s free to use and it instantly gives you a snapshot of any website you do an analysis for.

I highly recommend you do a check for your site and see where it stands. At this point, I am under a rock since this blog is very new.

Note: There are other tools you can use too. Hubspot’s Marketing Grader tool gives you a very specific run down analysis [ with simple explanations] on how your website/blog is and what you can do next.

You could also check out Seomoz’s tool.

Buffer

Buffer App

The buffer app just installs itself on your browser using which you can Tweet almost any of your favorite applications, reads, news, blog content, web pages, applications, and almost anything you see or stumble across on the web. If you go by how Twitter works, you know that the more you share the more influential or popular you become. I personally didn’t see much of a need for it given that I am on Twitter all day and do everything using the “Tweet” buttons that other publishers have, tagged to their published content. Perhaps you can tell me why I should go for the ‘pro’ version.

Social Guides

Social Guides

E-commerce is gigantic in size. Facebook is the face of Social Media. Bring these two together and you have SocialGuide. Social Guide allows you to start marketing on Facebook, run promotions, and even sell directly on Facebook. If you already have a massive following or a huge number of fans on Facebook, you can use Social Guides. I haven’t tried it yet since I am just starting out, I don’t have any fans on my Facebook Fan Page, and I am yet to design packages for my services to sell using this platform. I promise, I’ll update this section when I use it myself. Of course, there are multiple tiers of pricing (along with a free package which allows just a tab).

Social Oomph

Social Oomph

If you have been looking for a single tool that helps you schedule your tweets so that you don’t look spammy and almost as if you are on Twitter all day, boost your productivity, and help you do more with less, you should consider using Social Oomph. I use it everyday and I normally work for about an hour or so finding great information to share, Retweet, etc. I schedule it using Social Oomph with an interval of 30 to 45 minutes and I am done for the day. Meanwhile, the tweets get posted automatically.

Using Social Oomph, you can also send automated direct messages (with auto message rotating facility), follow back your followers automatically (or choose to vet them yourself manually) – all this is for the free version. When you go “pro”, you can do much more with it.

Nimble CRM

Nimble CRM

Nimble is a social media focused CRM. It helps you find profiles automatically, keep in touch with all your fans, followers, and others in your network through a single dashboard aiming for “unified communications”. In addition to allowing you to “Listen In” and respond proactively to your network, it also helps you to convert your social media network into leads. You might benefit from its in-built integration with Google Apps Market place.

You can start with a free package (Nimble CRM very recently went out of beta and now has two levels of packages). The free package gives you a single user account limited to 3000 contacts and only one account per leading social media platform – 1 email, 1 Twitter, 1 Facebook, and 1 Linked In. You could gain from up to 5 deals.