Top Social Media Tools

With the popularity of social media continuing to grow, it has become a challenging task to update and monitor the number of networks that keep growing. Fortunately, there are quite a number of tools available that help in managing the fast expanding social sphere. While some tools aim at maintaining multiple accounts on one site, others help in consolidating your web presence across many networks.

Here is a list of the top social media tools that can help your company create an edge and be more efficient and productive in your social media efforts.

• HootSuite: HootSuite is best used for actively-managed accounts. Its free version allows you to add five networks and supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, PingFm and WordPress. Paid versions offer Google Analytics integration and unlimited insights into finding out more about your audience. HootSuite is priced at $5.99 a month and maxes out at $1,998.99 a month for extended versions.
  Alternatively, you could also take a look at Scroon and Buddy Media.
• TweetDeck: This is the best of Social Media tools if you want to manage all your personal social media profiles. TweetDeck allows you to connect across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google Buzz by letting you update all or just a few with the same status at one time.
  Alternatively, you could also take a look at Seesmic.

• CoTweet: CoTweet is an excellent tool for small time businesses. It allows updates and follow-up messages to be assigned to specific social media managers, thus making it easier for these managers to handle questions and comments from followers. The CoTweet ‘Enterprise Version’ costs $1,500 a month but you can request a free demo.
  Alternatively, you could also take a look at Postling.
• Engage121: Engage 121 is an extremely customizable tool and can support just about any site with a social presence. By encompassing monitoring, broadcasting and engagement, Engage 121, can help you create a company-wide promotion message and use mail merge to broadcast it with a local store’s name and address. The pricing ranges depending on individual business needs.
  Alternatively, you could also take a look at Valuevine.
• SpreadFast: SpreadFast’s benchmarking feature is what makes it unique among other social media tools. Measurement in SpreadFast is determined by the amount of content distributed, how many people were reached and whether the intended audience was engaged. Social media managers can also compare social media campaigns to other strategies in the industry or to the same type of campaign as it was run in another industry. SpreadFast is pretty expensive with its plans ranging from $12,000 to $1 million a year.
  Alternatively, you could also take a look at Radian6 and Objective Marketer.