Five Favorite Social Media Marketing Tools

 

5 Relatively unknown Social Media Sites to increase social reach:

 

1. Sprout Social - Social Media Management

 

Sprout Social is a low-cost tool for social media mangement.

I have reviewed quite a number of social media management tools during my tenure as a Practical EcommerceI contributing editor, many of which offer highly useful features. Though none of them handle every task equally well, for my own purposes Sprout Social has become the "goto" application.

It's a low-cost tool - subscriptions start at $9.00 per month - that enables me to manage most of the social networks in which I actively participate. Not only that, it serves as a social listening tool, facilitates scheduled content publishing, keeps track of new fans and followers, and provides real-time reporting of my social network engagement activity. There is a mobile version, too, so I am not confined to a desktop or laptop when doing so.

2. Bottlenose - Social Listening

Bottlenose makes sense of social media conversations and trends.
I've always said "listening is the new marketing," and where social media is concerned, truer words were never spoken.

A recent find is Bottlenose, which is a social listening platform that tracks in real-time what's happening around the web on topics of interest to me. In fact, Bottlenose refers to itself as the "Now Engine." Though its interface is reminiscent of Tweetdeck or Hootsuite, Bottlenose was built for the express purpose of making sense of all of the conversations you and I follow, and the trends they relate to.

3. Wordpress - Business Blogging

Of all the blogging software platforms I've ever used - a list that includes Typepad, Blogger, Posterous, Tumblr - I continue to come back to Wordpress. No other platform offers the same degree of rich functionality, extensibility, and design flexibility. And while it's not the easiest platform to use, for long form blogging Wordpress can't be beat!

4. RebelMouse - Content Curation

RebelMouse is a content curation platform.

A prevailing trend in social media is content curation, which is the filtering of content based on topical categories, industries and tags.

A new curation platform, and one that I've really come to favor, is RebelMouse. Its ability to automatically capture, display and organize content from my Facebook and Twitter accounts have made it my "social front page." I can also edit content, highlight particular entries, and even move them around the page with drag-and-drop ease.

Due to its visually-oriented, Pinterest-like interface, it's also a tool that merchant's could easily use to aggregate and filter content from their e-commerce sites.

5. Jing - Screenshots and Screencasts

In addition to my own blogging and social media engagement activities, writing "how-to" articles for Practical Ecommerce often requires that I grab screenshots from sites I review. Of all the tools created for that purpose, no other accomplishes the task as easily as Jing.

Screenshots can be "marked up" with text boxes, arrows, highlights, or captions, and users can automatically store screenshots and screencasts at Screencast.com, a free file storage service.
Those are the five social media marketing tools I can't live without. What's yours? Feel free to comment.