Social Media: 8 Tools to Boost Your Social Presence

Clients often ask me which is the best strategy that I have developed or seen in my years in consulting and developing digital marketing (inbound marketing) strategies. The answer quite frankly is not one specific strategy, but a combination of strategies and tools used creatively to influence the customer to take action. And this is what is important to me when I measure the success of a campaign, it is not about how many people viewed it, and how many loved it, but how many people took the corrective actions. In this article I am going to briefly mention my favorite 8 tools that made a sound contribution in making people take the right action and determined the profitability of the campaign.

1. Seesmic:
Seesmic allows users to manage unlimited Twitter accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare accounts. A well organized dashboard  which allows you to sort a variety of timelines detailing tweets, retweets, @mentions, direct messages  and lists. This tool created by Loic Le Meur, founder of LeWeb and his San Francisco team also publishes trending topics, making it easy to join already popular conversations. This tool is free, simple and affords the ability to update several statuses, send direct messages and check in to locations from one easily navigated page. I like this tool because of its simplicity and ability to organize my data into simple yet effective reports for my perusal.

2. Brizzly: 
This tool simplifies your social media browsing and updating experience while taking some of the work out of keeping up to date with trends and followers. It lets you update on Twitter and Facebook, and comes with it the benefits of managing multiple accounts and is able to accurately measure the impact of your status live. Also keeps record of @mentions and retweets of your status. I like this app and is able to help me when I am updating my social media presence and that of the company in one simple update.

3. LiveFyre
This tool takes social commenting to a new level, the one that marketers like us get excited about. Using this tool users are more engaged with the story, tweeting out their comment is a breeze, and it really facilitates discussion on the blog, and across Twitter and Facebook. In one easy click you can send a a message saying "You were mentioned in this conversation..." with a link back to the blog post. I like this tool because it is free and in some way make your blogs more relevant for a longer period of time. If you can manage to get it into the social media sphere, you can harness that inherent virality that comes with it.

4. HootSuite.com
A fantastic free online tool to manage multiple social media profiles, pre-schedule updates for specific days and times, monitor keywords and analyze statistics. And, you can check and reply to saved searches, Twitter Lists, @mentions, Direct mentions and more. Also available as a mobile app which provides an excellent way to pre-schedule your social updates on the fly. I think what impressed me the most is the ability to schedule your posts for specific days, I love this cause it disciplines me to write my tweets early and my market can be conditioned to check my updates at certain time-of-day.

5. Facebook like Button
Adding a small piece of code to your website and/or installing the Facebook Like Button allows visitors to your website and blog to share your content with all their Facebook friends. You can change the verb from "like" to "recommend" - great for placing on the top right of an entire website. Include the Like Button on all opt-in pages and sales pages for extra viral visibility. I have to say that the Like Button has revolutionized my marketing efforts and is a tool I use consistently and every time with great amount of success. Clients love and fans are crazy about it and your website is incomplete without the Like Button.

6.  StepRep
This tool I use all the time, and it is essential for businesses who just starting to crawl in the social media sphere. Anytime that your business is mentioned, anywhere on the web, you'll hear about it immediately through StepRep. Which is very useful when you are running multiple online campaigns. It is able to give you reviews, mentions and even statistical data when you are mentioned in a positive, neutral or negative light. What I love about this tool is that it even has a mobile app, which impresses my clients and makes them believe that the campaign is doing what is intended to do. This to me is the easiest tool to use to listen to your target market, learn how you can improve your content and find out what your customers are thinking and use these insights to make your business smarter.

7. Sysomos
Information about what people are saying on their respective social media networks is big business, it is such big business that is has doubled the marketing budget of conventional marketing returns in just 2 years of its existence. And you can not mention a tool that listens to these conversations more accurately and consistently than Sysomos. Sysomos allows you to monitor billions of conversations happening in blogs, social networks, forums, news, sites and measures to give you access to an in-depth analysis. Gather intelligence on the conversations and understand what you should offer to the market and allows you to shape your business decisions and strategies. Finally identify and engage your strategy with key influencers driving the conversations and actively establish and maintain relationships.

8. HowSociable
HowSociable has been providing a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand's impact on the social web since 2008. HowSociable has measured over 250, 000 brands while requiring zero configuration on the part of the user and only a few seconds wait while they analyze a brand's presence to calculate initial scores. How it works is that it crawls into the social media networks and finds any mentions of your brand, any comments and any retweets or @mentions over a period of a week, and it uses a smart algorithmic intelligence and will give you a magnitude in which your brand is making in that particular social network. For me and my clients it is a quick and easy way to see the impact of your campaign over a period time.  And this for me shows "HowSociable" a brand is and it is one of the first tools I use. I use it in the infant stage of the campaign, in the youthful stage and in the mature stage and the client will be able to see the difference and able to measure the success of the strategy.

Marketers have consciously or unconsciously used social media tools creatively and have made social media a billion dollar industry based on a principle of hanging out or a chilled out philosophy. And this new way of marketing has made businesses do-away with old static ways of marketing and made way for a new optimized and energized way of engaging customers. At the rate that social media marketing is going, it will soon take over all other mediums and become the primary medium of marketing, sooner than we think......