Social Media Marketing Tools & Resources Resource Center 

Monitoring what people are saying about you is another key aspect of mastering Social Media. This specialized search engine helps you patrol the blogosphere with four tools -- Trend Search, Featured Trends, Conversation Tracker and BlogPulse Profiles -- which return a rich set of data showing you who's talking about what, to whom, when and where.

Track the conversation about you or your competitors, see who's reposting your material and what they're saying about it, or just see what trends are happening that day in blog posts and comments.

We use BlogPulse, a service of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, to track blog action on Web Digest For Marketers and the conversation around it, partly because it seems to index faster than Google.

The Trend Search graph shows the buzz, and how long it lasts, that results when we publish each issue of Web Digest For Marketers. Conversation Tracker shows us who's posting the newsletter using our blogger/Twitterer link, and Profiles gives us a quick glance at who's talking, their blog ranking if any and other posts to see what else they are talking about.

Cubics is exactly like Google AdWords, but instead of placing your ads on Google, they are placed on various social networks such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Friendster. You simply set up an account, write your ad and choose your target audience or site. Audiences can be targeted demographically to age, gender, geographic location and so on.

At the time of writing, the company served over 1 billion ads per month. Should you have a social media application that you want to monetize by running advertising on it, you can do so as well, just as you would with Google AdSense. The company is owned by AdKnowledge.

This tool builds connectivity between your brand site and your users' Facebook pages. After you embed the code for the Facebook platform into your site, Facebook users will be able to connect their accounts to it.

This application can encourage users to post links to your Web pages or products or notes about your content on their Facebook pages. Some industry experts believe this app has the potential to transform how viewers interact with the Web and the way marketers build online experiences.

This Facebook app allows marketers to create individual pages and invite an unlimited number of people to "fan" (as in "become a fan of") their brands. Fan pages get you past the standard 5,000-friend maximum per account, in effect at time of writing. What's more, once your brand has fans, it becomes a free advertising network. Some analysts have likened Facebook fan pages to a two-way communication-enabled phone book.

Whenever your company has a new product announcement or promotion, you can use the status-update feature to announce this development to every fan. It also can help you build a database of interested users.

The news feed that most Facebook users employ (unless they turn it off) extends the reach of your fan pages. Not only will your brand fans see your announcements, but so will their Facebook friends who are online at the time.

This official Facebook site gives you the tips, case studies, best practices, FAQs and user-generated experiences you need to market intelligently on this global social network, whether your marketing budget has two, four or six zeroes in it.

Look here for case studies of successful Facebook campaigns run by household-brand names like Adobe, Starbucks and Burger King, as well as tips on using Facebook's many features, such as creating events, amassing "friends," promoting your fan pages and using Facebook Connect to expand your reach to your Web site.

Setting up the site like a regular Facebook page also is a little bit of genius. Seeing all the interactions and elements and how they work together shows you firsthand that success on this network takes more work than just slapping up a page and moving on.

How effective is your presence on key Social Media sites? Does your online personality encourage or turn off potential followers? The evaluation tools at this site will help you quantify the nearly unquantifiable by measuring your Social Media profiles -- corporate and personal alike -- and comparing them to other users, and then give you ideas for how to improve your standings.

Created by marketing-services provider HubSpot, Twitter Grader evaluates you on your number of tweets, the ratio of your follows to followers, how often others act on your tweets and how influential your own followers are. The higher your influence, the higher your grade.

Facebook Grader assesses your Facebook public pages, noting your number of friends, whether you have big gaps in your profile data, the reach and authority of your friends plus a "secret sauce" of proprietary factors.

The Press Release and Website Grader apps give you similarly comprehensive evaluations. The Personality Grader measures your online demeanor and intelligence, sometimes in blunt terms. (If your Twitter posts contain too many negative concepts, you'll get downgraded for complaining too much.)

Once you get your grades, compare your results to friends or competitors who also have graded themselves. Also, get good tips for buffing up your profile and improving your score.

Once you dive into the Twitter conversation stream, you should look for a suite of tools to manage your time and tweet most effectively. HootSuite's gratis set of tools is designed for enterprise-level tweeting, because several administrators can manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard.

Among the tools:

• Scheduler: Use it to write tweets in advance, useful for posting product announcements or coupons at a specific time.
• Ow.ly URL Shortener: Tracks actions on links you post in tweets and delivers statistics to please the wonkiest analyst: total clicks, clickers' geographic distribution, most popular tweets, trends over time, etc.
• Account chooser: If you have more than one account, you can post a particular tweet either to one particular account, a group or all of them. Administrators can also monitor who's tweeting what from the dashboard at a glance.

HootSuite doesn't yet track retweets -- the number of times your followers pass along your posts to their own groups -- but you can measure retweets independently using Retweetist.

We test-drove HootSuite by tweeting the latest edition of Web Digest For Marketers to a personal Twitter following (500+ followers at time of writing). Within minutes, it collected 6 clicks from readers in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

The cleverly named KickApps company is in the business of helping you create and manage your own branded social media marketing universe. At the time of writing, there were four applications that you could plug into your website:

1. A social network application where users create a profile and then interact with one another;
2. A forum for user-generated content where visitors share and comment on said content (video, photos, audio, blogs, etc.);
3. Programmable video players to help you videoize your content; and
4. A widget builder that allows your content to be fed to your community, which they then pass it on to their community in a viral marketing kind of way.

Their business model is advertising-based, meaning they run ads pulled from their ad network on your application. Or you can make a partnership arrangement where you pay a fee based on usage; you can choose to run your own ads on your applications, or no ads at all. At the time of writing, there was no cost to start building your applications to test out the service.

This company offers a suite of social marketing tools that have a wide array of analytic and metrics features built right. While there is a fee for their more advanced, hosted solutions, they offer a gratis tool that you can download. This tool adds a metrics tracker to your existing social media applications, such as tell-a-friend programs, "friend finder" tools and the like. Any social media process that you have on your site can be tracked and reviewed through pie charts and graphs that show usage and pass along trends.

This tool does need to be technically married to your applications, so do be aware that your IT staff will need to get involved to implement it.

Social Media Today is a moderated community for social media bloggers, marketers, PR and media professionals. You can browse through the copious, informative content to get up to speed on the social media marketing phenomenon. However, as fitting for a social media marketing website, you are encouraged to create a profile, tell everyone about yourself, rate posts and even blog directly within this blog.

Categories include marketing metrics, social commerce, social advertising, reputation management and more,. The content is fascinating, whether it's short posts and conversations or longer submitted articles such as (at the time of writing), how to get hired in a Web 2.0 world, the ROI of social media or charts and graphs showing how the online consumer feels about and trusts social media. There's a long list of contributors with whom you are encouraged to network.