Looking for the hottest new tools to keep up with your social media? Looking to not spend an arm and a leg? Here are five new free social media tools released so far this year.
Need to manage your Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other social media sites in one convenient dashboard? Look no further than Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media portal application that allows you to lurk, contribute and measure all your social media outlets from one easy to use interface. With Hootsuite you can manage up to five social profiles, get automatic updates from your blog, track your brand, easily create Twitter lists and analyze clicks on shortened links. Hootsuite allows you to manage your accounts in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus Pages, Foursquare, Myspace, WordPress and Mixi. Also, you can do video chat with this tool.
Need to know what the Twitterverse is talking about today? Need to know how users are reacting to your product or content? The new real time search engine Topsy can help you out. Topsy is a search engine specially designed for real time search within social applications like Twitter. The results are not only based on real time data, but they are weighted toward factors such as link popularity and the influence of each person who cites a link. These factors make Topsy an excellent addition to traditional search engines for the social web.
If you need more information about Twitter users, FollowerWonk allows you to dig deep into user bios, follow activity and tweet frequency. Once you log in with your Twitter account, you can dive into FollowerWonk’s analysis tools that allow you to search Twitter bios, do user comparisons, analyze your followers, track your follower’s activity and sort your followers based on criteria such as name, number of days on Twitter, and tweet count, all in a friendly spreadsheet layout. It is also the best way to communicate with your friends.
Need some crucial face time with clients, coworkers or business partners? Looking to just spend some more quality time with friends and family through simple video chat? The new Google Plus Hangouts could be your solution. If you and your buddies already have a Google Plus account, all you need to do to start using Google Plus Hangouts is to download a simple add-on that works in your browser. Not only can you use video conferencing, but a number of collaborative applications are available to make your business meeting or casual meet-up with friends more productive and fun. Hangouts allows participants to watch Youtube videos together, update existing Google docs or a shared Hangout notes file together in real time, or play collaborative games together. Since Hangouts has an available api, developers are free to use their ingenuity to create new Hangout applications.
If you do not have a Google Plus account, or you are hoping to include other participants who do not use Google Plus, you can always use the new video conferencing application from, AOLAV. AV allows up to four users to sign into a video conferencing session without requiring the use of a Google Plus account or download a plug-in. AV uses your existing AIM profile, so as long as you have an AIM log in, the Adobe Flash Player and a web cam, you are ready to go.
With so many social media tools available, it can be a juggling act just to keep up. Armed with the right tools, these applications provide a needed advantage for managing today’s social media trends. These five tools offer great new methods for the ever challenging task of keeping up with social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Google, both for business and casual users alike.
