Best Social Media Tools for Internet Marketers

Here are some of the best tried-and-tested social media tools for internet marketers and bloggers:

1. HootSuite

One of the best social media management tools out there, HootSuite allows you to manage all your social media profiles from a single window. You can add a multiple number of profiles to HootSuite, and manage various different aspects from a single window.

It can be easily integrated with all popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, MySpace, LinkedIn, and FourSquare, to name a few. You can easily view your timelines, tweets, shares, likes, and just about any other activity on your social profiles. In addition, and this is where I feel HootSuite will prove to be particularly useful for internet marketers, HootSuite also provides plenty of custom analytics.

HootSuite also lets you schedule updates and tweets. All in all, makes it extremely easy to manage a large Facebook fanpage or a large Twitter following.

HootSuite is also available on the iOS and Android platforms as a free app.

2. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is another social media management tool and dashboard for Twitter and Facebook. It was acquired by Twitter last year, when it underwent some major changes, coming out of the process as a better product.

The downloadable application features multiple columns, all of this can customized and configured to show updates from Facebook and Twitter – such as timelines, mentions, comments, interaction, etc.

Tweetdeck, like HootSuite, also lets you schedule Twitter tweets and Facebook updates.

3. Vertical Response Social Media Marketing

Vertical Response’s Social Media Marketing is a great tool for small and medium enterprises. It helps them create, launch and promote their own social media campaigns from A to Z.

For starters, the service will provide relevant content that is guaranteed to get clicks on social networks such as on Facebook and Twitter. They will also assist businesses with developing their own social media marketing campaigns within a few short minutes. They offer various audience engagement solutions for all social profiles, and one of the ways that they do this is by creating and sharing coupons on social networks in order to encourage first-time and repeat customers.

Like any other good social media marketing service, they also provide plenty of metrics and analytics on reach and engagement, in order to determine the success of your social marketing efforts.

The service also combines social media with email – think of it like HootSuite combined with MailChimp!

4. Buffer

I’ll be honest, I just recently discovered and started using Buffer, and I’ve got to say, it’s a pretty nifty little service!

What buffer does, in simple terms, is that it allows you to schedule tweets quickly. For instance if you want to send out tweets quickly, in a specific order and at regular intervals, buffer is a great little tool.

So in essence, instead of overwhelming your followers or fans with a lot of updates all of sudden (or spamming their timelines with too many updates, you can instead ‘fill up your buffer’ at a single time during the day and the service will automatically post them throughout the day.

You can share articles, links, videos, images, etc. easily, and set which order they should be sent in and how many times in a day. You can post to a multiple number of accounts such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and share content between these social mediums as well.

5. Klout

Klout is a social media analytics service, which allows its users to measure their influence across their social networks and ‘empower every person by unlocking their influence’.

The service takes in excess of 400 variables into account, across many different social media profiles such as Twitter, Facebook, G+, LinkedIn, 4Square, Wikipedia page (if you have one!) etc. in order to measure their reach, size of their network, content created/shared, the people that they’re connected with, and determine their overall social reach and influence (the people that you influence and your own influences).

At the end, it provides you with your very own ‘Klout score’ – a measure of your social worth, to put it simply.  The score is a number between 1 and 100, and is a representative of your overall social media influence.

The scorecard, if it can be called that, also provides you with how your content has influenced people in your circles, the topics/areas of interest (based on what you usually share), among other things. You can then work on improving your social influence or your Klout score, or work on specific areas of your social influence, based on the score.

A very useful service, which might be more useful than you think! Go ahead and check out your Klout score.