35 Social Media Tools (many free)

A selection of the most popular tools for social media are listed below - with links. This is not a complete list, but hopefully it will help you and inspire you to look for more!

If you'd like to add to the list do so through the comments at the bottom.

Listening & monitoring:

Topsy - Real-time search for the social web Topsy.com allows you to search the global Twitter stream for mentions of names and phrases, as needed.

Twitter alerts via email by Twilert Twilert.com is a similar tool with options on searching in a geographic location.

Real Time Search - Social Mention allows you to search current mentions across many social media sites.

Addictomatic: Inhale the Web create a custom web page with the current mentions for your topic

Facebook Search – Inside Facebook searches Facebook

Icerocket blog search – search for blogs and more

Klout The Standard for Influence – the key influencer score

Creation:

WordPress.com A key blog creation tool, free for most uses

Tumblr – Free short picture and graphic posting uber-cool blog creation

LinkedIn – The business to business social media site

Blogger – Free Google blogging creation

Twitter – the gold standard in short blogging

Checkthis – create a web site in a few clicks

Facebook -  the number one social media site world wide

YouTube – the number one video sharing site worldwide

Flickr – the number one picture sharing site worldwide

Pinterest – the number one picture/style/fashion sharing site

Google+ - Google’s answer to social media

SoundCloud - Record and share your sounds for free – audio social media

Management of multiple social media sites:

Buffer – schedule Twitter & Facebook posts & track click through’s

TweetDeck by Twitter – schedule, monitor and manage Twitter feeds

Social Media Management | Sprout Social – schedule. monitor and manage

Social Media Management - HootSuite – schedule, monitor and manage

XeeMe – create a single identity for all your social media identities

Insight & analytics:

GoogleAnalytics – a lot of new analytics coming through here

How Far Did Your Tweet Travel? | TweetReach – does what it says

bitly | shorten, share and track your links – shorten links, then see how many use them

Twitter Stats by Twitter Counter – track your Twitter growth

Crowdbooster Dashboard - Your Network – analyse your Twitter network

Socialbakers (Facebook, Twitter…) marketing, stats – more stats

Viralheat | Social media analytics – serious social media analytics

Miscellaneous

FollowFriday Helper - FFHelper – picks out your best followers

Flush & Follow Twitter users: Tweepi – follows & flushes people 20/40 at a time

Social Media is Dynamite – my social media blog – lots of posts!

Who Unfollowed Me on Twitter: Twitter Unfollowers – see who stopped following.

Over to you!

Twitter Changes - The Moment of Truth

Image via CrunchBase

Two big changes are coming up in the Twitter universe in the next month.

Twitter will start rating Tweets as "none", "low", or "medium", with a reserved "high" tag for unspecified future use. 

The "medium" entries will approximate to the "Top Tweets" results for searches on twitter.com. This will allow applications to filter content from otherwise noisy or high-volume feeds.

This change is from the 20th February 2013. The tagging allows Twitter to create separate high rated Tweet streams. I see nothing wrong in this, but I hope that they present any paid for high rated tweets in a separate section of the screen, perhaps a box to the right of the current stream, as Google do for paid ads.

I hope they don't go down the Facebook route of only allowing your followers to see some of your posts/Tweets, depending on how often they click on your links and other nebulous factors.

The second serious change is the introduction of Twitter v1.1 API from March 5th, when a limited Twitter 1.0 shut off will be tested. I expect 1.1 will be rolled out over the weeks/months following the 5th, should 1.1 run smoothly.

1.1 will impact people using various Twitter tools. Some tools will have limits placed on the number of calls, Tweets, follows etc, which it can make in an hour. Some services in the Twitter eco-system may stop working.

The next few months will be interesting for all of us who have been amazed at the democratic and open nature of Twitter.

Here's some scenarios for what the above could lead to:

#Tweetstreams-as-ads that are dominated by paid for content, leading to a reduction in the appeal of Twitter.

#Censorship-of-Tweets. The ability of Twitter to remove all low value or "political/anti-establishment" tweets. 

#Growth-stunting The elimination of free apps such as bufferapp.com, which allows users to automate the process of Tweeting. These services may be replaced with higher cost services, which some SMEs, writers and other home workers won't be able to afford.  

The next few months will see the ground shifting for Twitter as it moves towards a stock market listing. 

English: Google+ wordmark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I imagine the executives at LinkedIn and Google+ are hoping for a misstep from Twitter in the next few months, which will give a new lease of life to their offerings for small and medium businesses. Or will Twitter get it right and courses on Twitter SEO become the rage a few years from now?

Come back again to see my take on how these changes are bedding down.