What’s In Your Social Media Toolkit?
You can think of social media as a set of tools that organizations can use for a variety of purposes – customer service, branding, promotion, relationship-management, etc. Just as with any toolkit, you’re not going to use every tool every time.
Sometimes the hammer fits, but if you’re trying to measure something the hammer is pretty much useless. Similarly, sometimes a blog will fit perfectly, while other times YouTube might be a more suitable tool. Sometimes (say it ain’t so!) social media outreach won’t fit at all.
If social media represents a set of tools – what’s in your toolkit?
Over the last two years my online toolkit has shifted back and forth as tools have come and gone. Recently, however, I’ve noticed a bit more stability in the services I use. Is this a reflection of a slightly maturing marketplace? Or just of a tough economy?
Here’s my current toolkit. I use these tools pretty much every day:
- Google Reader – to aggregate and archive news and other RSS feeds from blogs and tools
- Twitter – for real-time communication, connection, monitoring and learning via TweetDeck and search.twitter.com
- Delicious – for sharing and saving useful sites and articles
- Radian6 – for more complex monitoring solutions
- Facebook – for connecting with people and brands
- LinkedIn – for network building with people I know professionally
- Plaxo – for syncing between tools
- WordPress – for sparking conversations and learning from you here
- MicroPlaza – (new) for mining the links my key contacts post
- Present.ly – for communication within our company, alongside IM, email and the good ‘ole phone
- Bit-part players: StumbleUpon, Digg, Slideshare, Viddler, Flickr
What’s in your toolkit? What’s changed from a year ago?
