JK's Diary

Here goes a listing of 230+ social media tools for extraction, monitoring and analysis. This was compiled in 2011 so some of the tools might not available today. You can leave a comment if you find any such tools in the list and I will have them updated in the next version (2012). Before you start looking at the list of tools, its better you get a clear understanding of the various terminologies so you know which tool is meant for what.

Social Media Engagement (SME) tools are communication platforms where users take action and can respond, engage, interact or communicate directly on social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, etc…Users provide the login credentials and offer OAuth permissions and can Tweet, comment on a blog post or respond to a question in a forum without leaving the SME platform. These are real-time, highly customized dashboards and often offer multiple accounts, a shared workspace for many users and the ability to respond in multiple places with one click.

Social Media Monitoring (SMM) tools, often called listening platforms, are where most social media strategies begin – monitoring and tracking mentions of your brand, products, competitors and industry issues. SMM tools offer countless ways to analyze, measure, display and report findings

Social Customer Relationship Management (SCRM) tools aggregate dozens of types of information from multiple social networks to give users the most complete view possible of each customer.

Social Media Specialized (SMS) tools fall into a handful of buckets. These tools are not stand alone tools or comprehensive platforms, but specialized tools focused on on analyzing and optimizing one aspect of your social media efforts. The intent is to use these tools to supplement, not replace, other tools. Some of these tools are available on SMM or SME platforms, for example, you can view Klout scores within Seesmic Desktop. These tools can be broken down into the following categories:

• Influence – Klout, PeerIndex, TwinFluence, Twitority, Zuberance
• Conversion tracking – Argyle Social
• Twitter analytics – Bit.ly, Tweetreach, Twitalyzer
• SEO – Hubspot, SEOMoz, Raven Tools
• Xefer
• Ad.ly
• Soovox

Social Media Content Management (SMCM) tools facilitate the creation, distribution, optimization and management of social media content. Each tool facilitates at least one specific activity. For example, Timely posts your tweets at a future time to achieve the most reach.

Click here to download the Excel. The price mentioned is only a ball park as it can vary from time to time and client to client. Any ratings mentioned by the author are based on very small in-house research and might not reflect true ratings.