Social Media Marketing Tools & Resources Resource Center 

This Twitter tool can help you attract attention, build your authority as a thought leader and, incidentally, drive plenty of clicks. Paper.li compiles a daily digest of Tweets that either you have chosen or which match your set of search keywords and then formats them automatically into an attractive newspaper-like Web page on the Paper.li site.

Paper.li Tweets the link to your "paper" to all of your Twitter followers. That's where the payoff happens. Research has shown that Tweets with Paper.li URLs drive 33% more clicks than Tweets without them. That's what makes Paper.li such a powerhouse traffic driver, but it can also help you find new audiences, especially among influential Twitterers who don't follow you already.

Setting up a Paper.li publication is simple and complimentary. Log in with your Twitter account, and set your parameters (hashtags, interests, etc.). Paper.li takes it from there. Some marketers use their "papers" as a daily compilation of their own Tweets, while others share industry news, items that their customers would find interesting or other thought-leadership purposes.

Pinterest is the social-bookmarking site that lets users create and share virtual bulletin boards of interesting things they find on the web. Pinterest, with an estimated 1.5 million site visitors a day according to Google's DoubleClick, has become one of the top drivers of traffic to online retailers, ahead of Google+ and just behind Twitter and Google Search at time of writing.

If you're an Internet Marketer, it's worth your time to see what your fellow marketers are doing.

Although Pinterest frowns on self-promotion (you can't sell on Pinterest, but you can post links to your site), many retailers are finding success by showcasing customer-generated content about their products or posting related information that supports their product lines.

Here's one example: Lands' End Canvas brand ran a seasonal "Pin It to Win It" contest, which customers entered by "pinning" pictures of Canvas clothing items they either owned or wanted to buy.

Below are three other companies to check out on Pinterest:

• Gap
• NBC's TODAY Show
• Chronicle Books

Once you start amassing a personal or business following on Google+, you'll want to know more about the people you've added to your circles as well as the people who have circled you.

This fee-based service will help you dive deep into your following - or your competitors - to see who they are, where they live and work, who your most influential followers are, where they're active in social networking and other demographic data points.

Use this information to refine your messaging strategy or search for new followers to fill in the gaps and rebalance your profile. Reports are $4.95/month for personal profiles and $9.95/month for business pages, but you can buy multi-packs starting at 10 for $19.95 monthly (all at time of writing).

This tool gives you a quick snapshot of your most popular blog posts from the past year in three quick steps:

• Enter the email address associated with your Google Analytics account in the field provided on its homepage.
• Grant the app access to your Google Analytics account.
• Choose the blog you want analyzed and click the "Take Me to My Infographic" button.

Shareaholic reviews your Google Analytics data and posts an easy-to-read infographic showing your most popular posts for the previous year. And there's more! It also reveals the browsers most people use to read your copy, traffic sources, your visitors' locations and the most popular keywords.

This complimentary tool is one of the little extras provided by Shareaholic, a multi-network social sharing service.

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.

Spending 15 to 20 minutes on customizing your Social Oomph SocMed monitoring service will save you hours down the road on managing and monitoring your networks.

Among the more unusual perks with its free service: You can automatically follow back or block users according to the parameters you set (number of followers, days on Twitter, etc.). Social Oomph also watches for Tweets that mention your keywords and sends you a daily digest of posts. Want to wipe out your Tweeting history without starting over from scratch? Social Oomph lets you do that, too.

Upgrading to the paid Professional service gives you these added benefits:

• Add more social networks, such as Facebook and your blog
• Get more detailed analytics
• Delegate accounts among your marketing team members.

Trackur offers a service that constantly monitors millions of blogs, news sites, images and videos for mention of your brand, which they call "reputation monitoring." The service is like Google Alerts on steriods. While Google Alerts helps you find citations, that's it. This site takes it a step beyond that. Once you find citations, you are able to do store and manage, track, bookmark and in general organize your results.

Trackur also tracks millions of blogs, etc., whereas Google Alerts only tracks those results that are found on Google. At the time of writing, a gratis trial was available at the site.

PS - You'll also want to use this service to track the same results for your competitors.

Twepe has raised the bar for third-party Twitter services because it combines an information-rich instant notification service with a multifunction, multi-account dashboard that integrates with Google+.

Like other services, Twepe emails you instant notices whenever any of your Twitter accounts generate replies, mentions, retweets or direct messages.

However, it also gives you extra intel: Do you follow those Tweeters? Do they follow you? What are their Klout scores? How many followers do they have? How long have they been on Twitter? You can also customize your notifications to ignore potential Twitter spam and request a daily activity summary.

This information can help you build a stronger Twitter presence, find and engage with higher-quality Tweeps and measure the relative value of your followers.

Vocus is a Web-based public relations tool that lets you find the right contacts for distribution of your content or press releases. To do so, you review their database of more that 800,000 outlets, which includes journalists, analysts, publicity opportunities and more.

Unlike traditional PR services, this tool includes the distribution and tracking of your content to social media outlets such as blogs, wikis and social networks. There are many case studies from clients like Goodwill, Southwest Airlines and even the huge PR firm Edelman. At the time of writing, a whitepaper was available at the site that focused on the impact of PR in the social media arena.

Widgetbox is a directory of thousands of widgets, or freestanding applications. While many widgets simply deliver information from point A to point B, such as a stock ticker, widgets can work as a social media marketing tool in two ways:

1. You can create a widget that users want to pass on to their friends, which virally markets your company; or
2. You can create a widget that allows users to send information right back at you, such as comments, polls and other forms of content.

You can search or browse Widgetbox by category, which includes everything from blogs to business to weather. By doing so, you can find inspiration for widgets of your own, or you can actually use a Widgetbox widget at no cost in your own Facebook, Bebo, LiveJournal or other social media site where you have a presence.