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Apr. 23, 2008 at 10:38pm Eastern by Brent Csutoras
Tools For Engaging In Social Media
We all know Social Media Marketing can be pretty time consuming. There are numerous social media communities, each requiring you to sign up, make a profile, and participate, in order to have any success with them. So it is only natural that you would like to have some helpful tools to short cut the process wherever possible.
Below we will go through each of the major social communities that I use and outline some of the best tools to help you manage and maintain your accounts.
- Digg
A community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Articles are promoted to the main page at http://digg.com when they reach a certain threshold.
Digg Alerter is an absolute must have for any user interested in keeping track of their submissions.
“Digg Alerter is a program that sits in your system tray and alerts you whenever your stories are dugg or promoted to the front page. Simply specify your Digg username and the program will automatically keep you updated.”
Bury Recorder
Another great tool that allows you to track buries on any given submission. This tool will display the type of bury, number of diggs at time of bury, and the time and date a bury was received.
Bury Recorder utilizes the Digg Spy API tool, which is reported to only show a small amount of the overall Digg activity and thus could be inaccurate. It is still a great tool and very helpful.
For additional Digg tools, check out this post by DoshDosh – 12 Must-Have Tools for Digg Users.
- Reddit
A community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Unlike other social sites, Reddit doesn’t have a system that promotes stories to a front page. Reddit sorts all their submissions in numerical order, based on their current voting based score. The main page on http://reddit.com shows the top 25 ranked stories.
Reddit River is a mobile version of reddit.com. It is 3 times as light (in size) and automatically discovers mobile versions of stories posted on Reddit. It also supports viewing the various SubReddits.
For a really good and complete article on how to succeed on Reddit, check out 10e20’s post on Reddit.
- StumbleUpon
A browser guided social community where users can vote web content up or down from their installed tool bar. Each time you press the “Stumble!” button, you are shown a new page, based on the categories you have subscribed to in your options.
StumbleUpon Alerter is another great tool from Adamant Solutions and provides a great view at your StumbleUpon account’s activity.
You can quickly see who is voting on your discoveries, and how many votes and comments each discovery has received. You can also analyze your friends' activity and see which of your discovered domains performs better.
Make sure to check out DoshDosh’s really comprehensive article on StumbleUpon.
- Propeller
Very similar to Digg in that it is a community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Articles are promoted to the main page at http://propeller.com when they reach a certain threshold.
PropellerTray is a tool that allows you to see the vote and comment count on each of the content pieces you submitted to Propeller.com.
- Twitter
Service for people to quickly communicate and stay connected with other users. You can follow specific people and see their Twitter messages.
Twhirl is a great desktop tool for Twitter users. It allows you to do almost everything you can on Twitter but in a small window that resembles an IM chat window. In addition, the tool allows you to receive up to 3 recent Twitter messages in a quick view window similar to that of a new email in Outlook.
TwitterAdder allows you to add up to 20 random friends at a time to your Twitter account.
TwitterFeed allows you to publish an RSS feed into your Twitter account.
You can find some other interesting Twitter tools in Barbara Boser’s post on Twitter tools.
- Facebook
The StumbleUpon Application allows you to share any pages you have discovered or voted upon on your Facebook profile.
Digg has also released a Facebook application to display your Digg activity on your profile.
- The
Social Media tool
for Firefox
A must have additional to your social media tool arsenal. It allows you to single click buttons, at the bottom of your browser, for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious, to easily submit whatever page you are currently on.
You can also switch the tool over to “automatic” and it will display the vote counts for the various social communities next to links on any website you are browsing.
The above tools have made my social media experience much easier and more productive. There are many great tools out that can really help improve your social media experience, so get out there, tool up, and Be Social!
Brent Csutoras is an internet marketing consultant, who specializes in social media, viral and search engine marketing. The Let's Get Social column appears weekly at Search Engine Land.
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