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.

1. 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 https://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.

2. 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 https://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.

3. 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.

4. 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 https://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.

   

5. 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.

6. 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.

   

7. 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!