Cool Tools in My Social Media Arsenal
by Maddie Grant, Social Fish
Repost

So I’m inspired by Joe Flowers’ recent video of some cool tools in his social media arsenal, and while I am not quite as adept as he is for creating a video of this, I thought it had been a while since I listed any tools I use that you might not know about. As you might suspect, as a self-described “shiny new toy addict” I have tried probably thousands of tools and these are the ones that are rising to the top for me – mainly because they are simple and they work, and all are free, or started out free and are so awesome that I upgraded to the low cost versions. So here goes. These are not in any particular order beyond the categories listed.

Twitter-related

Yoono – totally awesome desktop app that has your Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook and other social network updates in one handy place. You can create all kinds of columns for types of updates or searches. This desktop app, in particular, has pop-up alerts – and after a little tinkering to get exactly the updates I wanted, I now have a nice little stream of updates in one small corner of my small screen scrolling along happily all day long. I can open it up to update any of those networks individually or all at once if I want to, or to reply to a DM or @reply. (Just for completeness, I will tell you I still use good old Twitter.com a lot and I also use Twittelator on my phone. A lot of the other desktop apps seem to have too much of a delay for me, and/or they tell me I’m rate limited all the time.)

Twitter Counter, Twitter Grader (by location) and Klout – these count as one for me; I think it’s important to keep an eye on my personal influence stats and following/follower ratios so that I understand it well enough to help others do the same and evaluate influencers in their industries, once they have been identified. There are loads of other tools for this but a lot of them seem to be complete gobbledygook, IMHO. These are the ones I come back to again and again.

Tweetshot it – this is the tool I use to (you guessed it) grab a screenshot of those individual tweets with some html code you can drop into your blog posts without having to download then upload a picture. You can of course use whatever you normally use to do screenshots, but this has a handy little bookmarklet (see the right hand sidebar of the website) and since I use it a lot it saves me tons of time.

Backtweets – Backtweets allows you to search for tweets linking to any url, but the awesomesauce is the advanced search page (linked here) where you can set up email alerts.

Mentionmap – really awesome visualization that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps. Jamie and I used this in our Great Ideas session to show how relationships are the currency of the social web; you could see that the @GreatIdeasConf twitter account was tied to other official ASAE accounts as well as people who were at the conference and NOT at the conference but talking about it.

Blogging

WebKut – Speaking of screenshots – I love this AIR app for doing screenshots. I’ve also used one called Jing but it crashed a few times and this one is lighter and easier.

PostRank Analytics – this tool is so good we’ve upgraded to a whopping $9 a month for it. Every blogger needs this – it will show you “engagement points” for every blog post, it will send you a daily engagement report showing all the posts that were shared or bookmarked each day, and if you set up the top posts widget (see my sidebar) you’ll see which posts percolate to the top. This works amazingly well, it changes all the time and it draws your audience deeper into the “best of” the blog – as voted by readers, not just as set by the blog owner.

Blog reading/sharing

Instapaper – can’t live without this one. Anything I read that did not originally come through my reader (say I clicked on someone’s tweet), I can save (using the bookmarklet) to read later in a bunch of ways, including on my iPhone. I can also set up folders with a feed into my Reader (which is my repository for everything), and I can send saved stuff to my Kindle.

Packrati.us – puts all the links you share in Twitter into your Delicious account, and even optionally anything you retweet by others. Stores any hashtags as Delicious tags too.

Reader2Twitter – very, very simple app that syncs your Google Reader shares and Google Buzz posts to your Twitter account.

Productivity

Tungle – a super cool and simple calendar application that syncs with whatever calendar you use and allows people to see your availability and suggest meeting times WITHOUT having to have an account or login to anything. I just started using this a couple of weeks ago and am never looking back! Much, much easier than that long email conversation going back and forth on possible dates for a meeting; you know the one…

Dropbox – backup your files into the cloud, but not only that, share folders with your colleagues. Never use a thumb drive again! Also accessible from your phone. Insanely simple and awesome.

Chat

TodaysMeet – this is a really simple, really awesome (I know I’m overusing those adjectives but then that’s the point of this post) way to show off a chat “backchannel” to a group of people who are NOT necessarily on Twitter.

CoveritLive – our chat platform. Very impressed with it; the interface allows replays of past chats, scheduling several chats in advance, lurking, email reminders, and you can even have someone on a webcam and do announcements and polls inside the chat. Rockin’.

iPhone apps

OK here are a few bonus tools for the iPhone, and I do apologize to those of you who are not yet converted (though some of these may be available for other handhelds too). But I’m finding the iPhone has truly changed how I work and continues to amaze me with all the game-changing stuff I can do on it.

• Ego – check your website stats instantly, including Twitter numbers, feed subscribers, etc.
• MobileRSS – Google Reader app which syncs with your reader including starred items and friends’ shared items. Share straight from the app to Facebook, Twitter, Instapaper, Delicious, or star or save for later. I read through tons of posts on my phone and save the good ones to share at more appropriate times (as in, not midnight when I’m lying in bed reading). I use this every single day. (Note – I used to love Byline but just discovered after it stopped working that it’s basically a dead app.)
• Use Your Handwriting – I upgraded to the Gold version – this is so cool, you just write on a black screen with your finger and it saves your notes. MUCH faster than typing into a “to do” list when you’re running around (like writing down where you parked at the airport). You can check things off, create folders for big ideas, and email them to yourself. It gives you a little red “count” when you’re not in the app to remind you about to do’s you wrote in there.
• Whiteboard – an AMAZING app where you can share a whiteboard via bluetooth with someone nearby who also has the app. Of course you end up playing tic tac toe with it – but wow.
• Mindnode – a great mindmapping tool. I feel like if you can mindmap your big ideas or your article outlines or whatever on your phone, then it makes your writing clearer. It syncs to a Mac desktop application but since I don’t currently have a Mac I don’t need that.
• SocialFish app – yes this is a shameless plug but we don’t do that very often (some would say nowhere near enough!) and everyone tells me it rocks so I’m including it. Hope you’ll check it out if you haven’t yet.
• And last but not least – my free Kindle iphone app – I can’t tell you how much I love this and how many books I have read that I thought I’d never have time to read. It’s much cheaper, first of all, to buy Kindle versions of books than the hard covers, and you’re more likely to read during any random downtime (like waiting at the dentist’s office or on the metro) than if you had to rely on carrying your actual Kindle around. And, I do have a Kindle, and you need to have a light on to read it at night – but you don’t on your phone. I thought the small screen would be weird, at first, but it’s totally not. Love it.

Enough for ya? Check ‘em out and tell me what you think. And let’s compare notes – what cool tools do you use? Gimme your top five that are off the beaten track. Post ‘em in the comments!