Socialmedialand

 These are tips, tools, and links to services that can help you effectively manage and measure your efforts in Socialmedialand

General

• Bit.ly: Shorten long URLs to fit in a status or tweet (or anywhere really) and be able to track how many clicks it gets. Really helps with the tricky ROI portion of social strategy. It also supports an API feature so you can integrate it with third party tools like Tweetdeck.
• Social Network Stats (2009): Jeremiah Owyang has aggregated this page full of information about social network usage in 2009. He provides overview, analysis and links to original research all in one place – pretty convenient. It will be updated throughout 2009 so check back!
• Namechk: Type in a keyword or username and this will bring back a list of sites that do and do not have that name still available. Great for when you’re auditing a brand to see if anyone’s “hijacked” your name. Similar site(s): Knowem
• Yahoo Pipes: Pull in several RSS sources into one convenient RSS feed that you can share with other people (for monitoring or keeping up to date on trends) or use to automatically post shared items to Twitter/Facebook etc.

Twitter

• Tweetdeck: I’m a fan of Tweetdeck – it allows you to categorize and organize your Twitterfeed into something that’s actually manageable and actionable. You can log into multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook and Myspace (yea, I know, but you can.) I don’t know how many columns of tweets you can have, but I haven’t hit the limit yet. You can group people into columns by whatever category you like and you can also have searchs for particular keywords or @mentions in their own columns. It keeps evolving to utilize the most popular third party apps. Great tool. Similar site(s):
  • Twhirl: Twhirl works like an AIM client for Twitter. Very basic, you have the feed in the top of the box and your input field in the bottom. You can flip between your whole feed, @replies, direct messages and search. The biggest plus – you can have multiple accounts open in different windows.
  • Seesmic: Similar to Tweetdeck, is supposed to have support for managing Facebook pages but I haven’t been able to get it to work.
  • Twitterrific: A Twitter client for Mac users
  • Hootsuite: An online version of these types of apps. It also features a “schedule” option to have tweets go out in the future.
• Objective Marketer: A very versatile Twitter/Facebook Management client. Some of my favorite features: multiple account management, can create campaigns and compare performance on clicks, retweets, etc, can automate feeds, can add a “landing page” banner in an  iFrame that overlays whatever link you share – giving you visibility for the content.
• TwtApps: Simple and useful business applications to help you engage with your customers and promote your business through social media. Free to use and with no advertisement (additional features available for power users.)
• Twitpic: I still think this classic is the easiest photo sharing tool on Twitter but there’s also yFrog, TweetPhoto and more
• Twitterfeed: automatically publish a feed (like your blog) through your Twitter account. Free and easy.
• Klout: The best Twitter measurement system I’ve seen yet. It gives you really awesome stats on how much you influence your network, the number of conversations you start, how much you’re retweeted. It’s all really interesting (slightly narcissistic) stuff. However, it’s also convenient for stalking other brands/competitors.
• LocalTweeps: If you type in your area code and send a tweet from your account you’ll be listed in a city based directory of Twitterites. You can also use their database to find people to follow who are local in your area. This can be helpful if you want to find some friends for Tweetups or if you’re a company looking to attract local business. Similar site(s): WeFollow
• Tweetake: Backup your Twitter information (like followers, favorites, messages, etc) before making any major change to your account. Good way to ensure you won’t lose your account data.
• ReTweet Tools: If you write a tweet that your followers really like, they may resend (or retweet) the message to all of their followers. Dan Zarrella has done a lot of research on this phenomenon and now provides us with two really cool tools. 1) The ReTweetability Index: tells you the top users based on how much they themselves are retweeted (indicating you may want to follow them because they’re probably pretty interesting.) and 2) ReTweet.net(beta): A tool where you can input a URL you’d like retweeted and get suggestions on how to increase it’s retweetability.  
• Tweepi: Follower management system, with stats and settings that help you better control who you follow and followback.
• 50 Twitter Tools: I saw this link and it’s actually a great list of things you can use to help you manage your Twitterverse. Some of them boarder on the “auto-pilot” side (which I don’t particularly like) but there’s some valuable stuff in there and rather than repost it all I thought I’d just give you what they created.

Blogging

• Google Analytics: Set this up on your blog (or webpage) to get visits, page views, unique visitors and more. There are more robust tools out there – but this one is free so anyone can set it up.
• TweetMeme: A Twitter button you can install on your blog (or anywhere) that tracks how many people tweet about your post. They can click the button directly and it will give them a prepopulated message, retweeting you, with the title of your post.
• Facebook Share Button: Similar to the TweetMeme button (but slightly more complicated to use…) 
• Thesis: I’ve been working on switching over to this theme – highly customizable and some great optimization features. However, it requires a basic working knowledge of PHP and CSS which I lack.
• All-in-one SEO: Helps you optimize your Wordpress blog for Search Engines using meta data and more
• AddThis: A service that provides you with a social booking marking button you can add to your blog or website and then track the activity that results. I’ve gone back and forth between AddThis/ShareThis and others that are “prettier” but when it comes down to it – you want something that will track well and is universally recognizable. I think AddThis is really the best for those two things. (Not including custom coded solutions of course)
• TinyMCE: Makes it easier to format your posts
• Subscribe to comments: Unless you’re using Disqus or some other comment management tool (I’ve never got around to using/testing on of them but if I do, I’ll let you know) you need to at least install this so people have the option to stay involved in the convo.

Facebook

• Tweetpo.st: This app lets you choose which updates you want to put on Facebook using a #fb tag. But it will also automatically translate links into Facebook’s format (with preview of the link, picture, video, etc) and change any @UserName to the actual name of the person which is more consistent with Facebook’s community.
• Involver: A suite of Apps that add some cool functionality to your page. Most apps available on Facebook.com will automate some streams but they won’t publish the content into your news feed (meaning no impression on your fans). Involver can change that for polls, video (YouTube), pictures (Flickr), and some premade custom tabs like a page gallery or a lead sign up form.
• Objective Marketer: A very versatile Twitter/Facebook Management client. Some of my favorite features: multiple account management, can create campaigns and compare performance on clicks, retweets, etc, can automate feeds, can add a “landing page” banner in an  iFrame that overlays whatever link you share – giving you visibility for the content.