42 Top Social Media Tips And Tools
Over the last six months or so I’ve come across hundreds of useful tips and tools online. Rather than keeping them to myself, I thought I’d share a few of them with you.
I’ve grouped the list “Tips” and “Tools” under eight categories:
1. Analytics/Measurement
2. Blogging
3. Micro-Blogging
4. Miscellaneous
5. Mobile/Telephony
6. PR/News Releases
7. Search/SEO
8. Social Bookmarking
Analytics/Measurement
Tips: Google Analytics Videos on YouTube
These videos are a great source of insight into how you can continually improve your web analytics practices.
Tips: Web Analytics Demystified
This is a wonderful post outlining the basic ways to use web analytics.
Tools: Feed Analysis 1.1
Great tool for analyzing Feedburner trends over time.
Tools: Feedjit
Show off your live web traffic.
Tools: RobotReplay
RobotReplay lets you record and watch your website visitors in action. View recorded sessions of every mouse movement, click and keystroke.
Tools: The BuzzMonitor
Aggregation tool produced by the World Bank.
Tools: Websites As Graphs
Chart your website’s social graph.
Blogging
Tips: RSS Specifications
All about RSS feeds.
Tools: CoverItLive
A hosted service for blogging events in real time.
Tools: Great Places to Find WordPress Plugins
Resources for finding excellent WordPress plugins.
Tools: Top 10 Template Generators for Blogs and Websites
Does what it says on the tin.
Micro-Blogging
Tips: Six Signs That Twitter Isn’t For Your Nonprofit
In reality, this is a great list of pointers on how to — and how not to — use Twitter.
Tips: The 10 ways I learned to use Twitter in 2007
Dan York lays out how and why he uses Twitter.
Tips: Twitter: Crisis Case Studies, Useful Applications and a Beer
Some great examples of ways to use Twitter and tools to use it more effectively.
Tips: What the Web Strategist should know about Twitter
Great post by Jeremiah Owyang introducing Twitter, outlining benefits & limitations, and explaining ways to use it.
Tools: Buzzter
Twitter search tool (also available in Japanese).
Tools: JTL
Tool that pulls out the 50 most recent links from your Twitter feed. Requires Google Gears to work; doesn’t work in Flock.
Tools: Snitter
One of the most popular desktop apps for Twitter.
Tools: Terraminds
Another search application for Twitter.
Tools: Tweeterboard
Conversation analytics for Twitter. Still a little buggy and not comprehensive, but very useful nonetheless.
Tools: Tweetscan
Real-time Twitter search. Great tool for filtering through your Twitter feed.
Tools: TwitDir
A Twitter users directory.
Tools: Twitter Karma
Who are you following? Who is following you back?
Miscellaneous
Tips: Black belt scheduling with Google Calendar
Useful Google Calendar tips.
Tips: Google Embeddable Calendar Helper
Useful help page for embedding Google Calendar in your webpages.
Tips: Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive
Fantastic introduction to web 2.0.
Tips: Simplifying Ajax For Marketers
Neat 101 post explaining the benefits of AJAX for marketers.
Tools: 11 Open-Source Projects Certified As Secure
List of open-source projects that have been certified as free of security defects.
Tools: AnchorFree
Free, reliable wi-fi security. Can use to access US-only sites too.
Tools: My Office 2.0 Setup
A thorough list of leading online office applications.
Mobile/Telephony
Tools: Eye-Fi
The Eye-Fi Card is a wireless memory card. It automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera to your PC or Mac and to your favorite photo sharing, printing, blogging or social networking site.
Tools: Large-Scale Conference Calls With *Better* Voice Quality Than The PSTN (using Skype)
Dan York highlights a Skype extra that allows high-quality, large-scale conference calls over Skype.
Tools: Spinvox
Voice-driven posts to blogs, twitter, jaiku, facebook and more.
PR/News Releases
Tools: PR Web
Online, socially-enabled news wire service.
Tools: PRX Builder
Awesome social media news release creation tool.
Tools: Social Media Newsroom
A template for a social media newsroom from SHIFT Communications.
Tools: Social Media Press Release
Todd Defren & SHIFT Communications’ original SMNR template.
Tools: Social Media Press Release: The Next Step
HTML template for a social media news release.
Search/SEO
Tips: How to Generate Web Site Traffic: The Meta List
I’m linking my list of links to a list of links. Shoot me now. I haven’t checked all of these out yet. This is a list of free resources to increase your web traffic.
Tools: Searchmash
Non-advertised testing area run by google – some interesting new ajax features integrating results with images, video, and wikipedia.
Social Bookmarking
Tips: Become A del.icio.us Power User
Pointers on how to use del.icio.us effectively.
Tools: Social Bookmarking Submission Tools
Lee Odden outlines some tools to make social bookmark submissions easier.
(photo credit: Faraway)
