Top 10 Marketing Sites, Apps & Tools for 2011

1. Google+ Your Business

Launching Google+ business pages was one of the most anticipated Social Media events of 2011, second only to the Google+ launch itself.

This guide takes you step by step through the process of setting up your Google+ business page, with special attention to two of the features that set Google+ apart from other social networks:

• Setting up and using the Hangout video chat feature
• Measuring page activity with Google+ Ripples, which helps you identify influential people who respond to and share your content with their own circles.

2. EdgeRank Checker

EdgeRank - newsfeed visibility - is what it's all about for Facebook Pages. It gauges how likely your posts are showing up in your fans' newsfeeds, something Facebook Insights analytics package doesn't tell you.

However, you can generate an educated guess with this complimentary tool, which uses algorithms based on Facebook calculations to create an "EdgeRank Score."

Facebook Page admins can use EdgeRank Checker several ways to measure their page performance. Here are two:

• Track your score over time to see whether it is going up or down.
• Use EdgeRank Checker's optimization suggestions, based on Facebook best practices, to boost fan engagement which will increase your visibility.

3. SiteTrail

Any website analyzer can dump rows of data onto a single page, but SiteTrail organizes its numbers into easy-to-decipher infographics and adds detailed Social Media performance for a more holistic view of your website's effectiveness.

In testing SiteTrail with the Web Digest For Marketers site, we uncovered numerous mentions of our articles in places we were unaware of previously, such as social bookmarking sites Digg and Delicious, the Topsy SocMed search engine and Wikipedia.

SiteTrail has the potential to be a handy source of competitive intelligence about your competitors' websites because it includes a "Site Value" analysis of potential advertising revenue along with the usual visitor, link, SEO/keyword-density and traffic analyses.

One quibble: You have to scroll past a big Google AdSense leaderboard to reach the analysis modules. It's misleading at first glance, and both site and readers might be better served if it were elsewhere on the page.

4. Subjectlin.es

This tool, developed by email technology provider OtherInbox, taps its proprietary email deliverability data to give you content and competitive intelligence you can use to write subject lines that resonate with your recipients and help your messages slide through spam filters.

Here's how Subjectlin.es can help email marketers or publishers:

• Learn which subject lines drove the most opens or spam complaints in specific market verticals such as retail, financial services or travel.
• Find out who else sent subject lines that are the same as or similar to yours.
• Spy on your competitors' email programs. Find out how much email they send, how many opens and spam complaints they generated and their five most recent subject lines.

Subjectlin.es is in limited public beta testing at the time of writing but will become a public paid service in early 2012.

5. Buffer

Many Twitter applications let you schedule Tweets, but we like Buffer because it streamlines your Social Media activity and keeps you on your Twitter followers' radar without distracting you from other work.

Buffer is ideal if your Twitter strategy revolves around sharing links or promotions. You set your own sending schedule and create Tweets using Buffer's status update form or an extension to your Firefox or Chrome Web browser. Buffer sends your Tweets out automatically according to your schedule.

Once your Tweet goes live, track activity on your Buffer dashboard, including reach (how many people viewed your Tweets) and number of clicks on links in your Tweets.

6. Social Fresh

Ready for a blog that takes a brass-tacks approach to Social Media? Social Fresh removes the "gee whiz" from Social Media marketing and aims to help marketers use SocMed to build their businesses.

Although blog posts often cover new SocMed tools and developments, they focus more on cutting through the hype and making sense of social networking and other initiatives in a business context.

Two recent blog posts illustrate this approach:

• "Augmented Reality - amazing but so what!" criticizes several AR marketing campaigns that either didn't work or had little practical application.
• "8 Facebook Competitive Analysis Tools, An Epic Guide:" The title is tongue-in-cheek hype, but the article examines 8 Facebook analytics tools in greater depth and detail than many other posts.

7. Mobile Awesomeness Gallery

Who's doing the coolest mobile campaigns, and what do they really look like on the smallest screens? This website presents a curated list of campaigns in all their full-color/actual-size glory.

Campaigns for products such as Sony, Xbox and Home Depot show you not just how to design for the limitations of the small screen but also how to exploit the advantages smartphones have over their desktop/laptop counterparts.

After you scroll through the campaigns posted on Mobile Awesomeness (a project of the Brightwurks web development company), sign up for the email newsletter, which sends one example of a campaign to your inbox every business day.

8. The Next Web

Think of this Internet news site as "Mashable minus the noise." TNW offers 10 international editions and concentrates on Internet technology, business and culture with daily blog updates and daily or weekly email newsletter digests.

While many of the stories on TNW are not strictly marketer-centric, they cover many issues that affect marketers, especially those who use Social Media.

We keep a close watch on TNW because its writers are often among the first to report on new tools and platforms, such as CircleCount (a Google+ tool that generates a score estimating the reach of your status updates).

9. Lujure Facebook Tab Creator

If you can copy HTML code and paste it into a data field, you can use this tool to create your own custom Facebook Page tab, which in turn drives greater fan engagement and gives you a higher profile on Facebook.

We like Lujure's wide variety of point-and-click applications you can use to add value to your Facebook Pages, whether it's a "fan-gate" page to generate more "Likes" or an interior page to drive email subscriptions, show videos or sell products, services or downloads.

Want to see a Lujure-built page in action? See the Welcome tab on the Facebook Page for Facebook Marketing All-in-One for Dummies, which the company built as a thank you for being mentioned in the book.

Lujure is a paid service, but you can create a single Facebook Page tab at no charge.

10. Leadsyncer

The business card fishbowl is a standard fixture at trade show booths, but those hot leads can grow cold the longer they sit in it.

Instead, give your booth attendants iPads with this lead collection app, and send them out into the crowd to collect the data right from prospects.

Using forms you design and upload, this app cuts the lag time between data collection and data entry and improves accuracy. Your booth people spend more time chatting up prospects and less time waiting in line for the booth computer.

Synch with your customer management system or download your data to a spreadsheet for further review. The app costs $9.99 at time of writing.