From Denmark to Detroit, social media is a worldwide phenomenon that seems to be part addiction and part necessity. With Facebook’s recent announcement that it’s hit 500 million users and Twitter’s move toward advertising with @earlybird it’s becoming more apparent that if you want to get the word out about your business you need to step into the social media arena. However, all the excitement about social media doesn’t mean much if you can’t decipher what it means and what it’s doing. Analytics to social media are like a compass to a navigator – if you don’t understand where you’re at you won’t know where to go.

If the thought of analytics and numbers makes you shudder you’re not alone. There are more people than not who feel intimidated by numerical data. The two toughest aspects of social media analytics are interpreting information and deciding what analytic tools best meet your needs. Fortunately, basic analytics doesn’t require a PhD in statistics and the internet is filled with outstanding free tools and resources to help make metric crunching easy. So, if you can’t afford enterprise-level services like Scout Labs, Radian6 or Sysomos, you’ll want to check out some of the freebies below to help you get a grip on your analytics.

Blogs

Use PostRank to help rank your blog content and news and and to determine what your fans are reading, sharing and organizing. It also identifies what your most popular posts are in your RSS feed.

Think of BlogPulse as a search engine for blogs and their posts. It’s similar to Technorati, but it provides additional views such as trending and conversations so that you can see search competitive topics and how other blogs are ranking.

Comments

Beyond standard search for keywords and brand names you’ll want to penetrate what’s being discussed in blog commenting systems too. That’s where YackTrack comes in. Simply enter your keywords or terms to see a nicely organized list that you can drilldown to get specific mentions from.

Branding

One of the more substantial branding tools available is Social Mention. It aggregates user generated content from across multiple social media platforms and streamlines outcomes into a very simple and easy to interpret web page. The one thing Social Mention doesn’t do is show a report over time. A work around this missing feature is to create an Excel spreadsheet and manually enter daily data that you gather. Otherwise, it’s a great (and free) tool.

Perhaps more of an entertainment tool rather than a true metric evaluator, How Sociable measures your brand’s keywords throughout 32 different social media sites. There’s some confusion around the ‘visibility score’ that How Sociable has developed and not all data appears to be accurate. For example, if you run a search on iPhone it yields a visibility score of 9,453 and a Google PageRank score of zero. Odd to say the least. Looks like brand visibility metrics might have a few glitches, but it’ still worth exploring.

Trends & Topics

Head over to Addict-o-Matic and enter a unique search term, brand or product name or just about anything and it will perform a search that delivers the buzz (or results) broken down by social media platform. It’s a very convenient snapshot that let’s you look at your social reach and the social sites where you have more presence in comparison to others.

Twitter

There are so many Twitter tools available that deciding which one to use can be a daunting task. For the purpose of benchmarking your brand against your competition, Twitalyzer is ideal. It shows you what social media strategies are working and what’s not, which makes it easy to adjust social media campaigns to maximize better results.

The power of influence is a core component in any social media campaign. Knowing who has better reach and strength and engaging with them can help persuade your audience to promote your brand. Klout measures influence as it relates to your brand through Twitter. You can identify which customers and communities are more likely to become brand evangelists and work with them to drive conversations.

Another hand Twitter tool is TweetStats. You can graph how many tweets per hour, day and month, as well as look at your tweet timeline and reply statistics. TweetStats is a fantastic way to track your level of interaction and look at areas that need improvement.

Google

Google Analytics (GA) may leave you feeling unnerved, but it actually does a tremendous job on tracking numbers and data. We’ll save GA how-tos for a future post. In the meantime, use PageRank Checker to see what Google thinks of your site. Using a scale from zero to 10, with 10 holding the most authority, you can run a quick search to find out how you rank.

In order for GA to actually work on your website you need to install tracking code on each page that you want the Google bot spiders to crawl. To make sure that you’ve set-up your code use SiteScan to confirm that you’ve performed a correct installation. Although SiteScan and PageRank Checker aren’t direct analytic tools they are helpful in gauging Google-related tasks and standards.

Competitive

Quarkbase has been touted as the ‘imdb.com for websites’. By entering a website’s URL you are presented with names of people associated with the site, traffic data, social popularity, site description and sites that are similar. This is one of the best free competitive research tools available. Data can be used to help you better position your brand and establish goals and objectives.

There you have it. Granted, there are so many tools, free and paid, that accessible on the web, we hope that this short list gets you moving in the right direction.

What are some of the other free tools that you’re using? How do you make them work for your brand and what do you like best about them? Share with us.

If you’re looking for a Twitter solution that combines both marketing and management then you absolutely must check out Market Me Tweet. Before you roll your eyes at the thought of yet another Twitter tool you’ll be happy to know that Market Me Tweet is a true stand-out from the pack of Twitter apps that have permeated the social media realm. What sets Market Me Tweet apart from the competition is its branding capabilities and that’s good news for businesses small and large.

For the most part, Market Me Tweet is similar in scope to the Hootsuite dashboard and its functionality. Users can integrate multiple Twitter accounts to track and tweet too. It can monitor keywords, schedule tweets in advance, track conversation threads, follow and unfollow users, autotweet RSS feeds and much more. As previously mentioned, the big difference is that it allows users to ‘brand’ their tweets.

For instance, if you’ve ever sent a tweet using a tweet client like TweetDeck, Tweetie or Hootsuite, you’ve probably noticed each tweet is labeled with a backlink to the application used to generate the tweet.

With Market Me Tweet you have the ability to customize your own branded backlink that not only features your business, site or blog name, but let’s you choose the URL to link back to. In essence, you can optimize your brand and drive traffic back to your site.

The benefits of being able to brand, optimize and create backlinks to each of your tweets is a home run for your online social presence. For every single tweet that you send and that someone else retweets you’re creating additional exposure via a customized backlink. Incredible!

Of course all amazing tools come at a price, but the nice thing is that Market Me Tweet is reasonably affordable. There are several monthly price plans available to suit your individual or professional needs. The investment that you make will pay back in spades, especially when you consider how many backlinks your tweets will be generating throughout the Twitter-sphere.

Are you already using this revolutionary tool? What type of success are you seeing? Drop a line and keep us posted.

Ever since LinkedIn opened up its application programming interface (API) platform to developers in November 2009, new social media enhancements have been created to fortify networking connections. One social media partnership in particular is the one between LinkedIn and Twitter. The two platforms have continued to join forces and collaborate on projects to make user interactions even better for the rest of us.

Twitter Feed

As far as integration goes, LinkedIn and Twitter are doing a commendable job on getting things to blend together smoothly and seamlessly. Most LinkedIn users are well-aware of the ability to link Twitter to their LinkedIn profiles. The result is a steady stream of tweets that keep your connections and profile viewers apprised of what you’re up to in the Twitter-verse.

Tweet & Post Control

In addition to joining your Twitter and LinkedIn accounts together, tweeters have the option of selecting which tweets they’d like to feature on their LinkedIn profiles. Filtering tweets is a great way to categorize and control personal and business related tweets instead of flooding your LinkedIn account with all things tweeted. For tweets to LinkedIn, visit your Twitter settings page and select or deselect the option to post tweets that contain the hashtags #in or #li.

Conversely, you can decide what updates to share from LinkedIn to your Twitter account by visiting the ‘Home’ tab on your profile and checking the box next to the Twitter icon in the Network Activity window.

Company Buzz & Tweets Applications

Another new pair of features that LinkedIn has is Company Buzz and Tweets. The Company Buzz is an application that lets you track tweets about companies, products and people from your LinkedIn page, as well as historical data and trends. This could be a good thing to do if you’re keeping tabs on your competition or interested in new career opportunities within your industry.

The Tweets application is kinda like having a mini-version of Twitter built into LinkedIn. Instead of having to login to your Twitter account, you can tweet away from right from your profile.

More Integration Tools With Tweets

Today, LinkedIn and Twitter unveiled their newest feature which is admittedly impressive and long overdue. By installing the Tweets application, LinkedIn users will now be able to find relevant professionals to follow and find and keep track of their LinkedIn connections on Twitter. Install the Tweets application first and then use the ‘More’ link from the menu at the top of the website to find everyone that you’re connected to and start following.

The new module ‘Connections to Follow‘, has also been added to recommend new people for you to follow based on your LinkedIn connections. Furthermore, a ‘Connections‘ tab is visible in the Tweets app that shows you all your LinkedIn connections who have added Twitter accounts to their LinkedIn profiles. From here you can even see who you are and are not following via Twitter and choose whether to follow or unfollow. Hover your mouse over their Twitter ID and get a glimpse of their last tweet.

All of these new additions are fantastic, but the real crème de la crème is being able to save your LinkedIn connections as a dynamic Twitter list. LinkedIn creates a private Twitter list from the connections that you choose to save to it. Visit your Connections tab, look at who has a Twitter account, add to the list and you’re done. Even better, LinkedIn keeps this private list up-to-date by adding and removing accounts based on your LinkedIn connections each day.

Get ‘Er Done

To take advantage of these fantastic features, head over to LinkedIn and install the Tweets application and Company Buzz to your profile. Please let us know what you think of the new features. Happy connecting

Aside from the pre-installed Hello Dolly plugin that comes with your WordPress blog, there are thousands of other super useful add-ons that can boost the power and presence of your blog. Because your blog is the central feed to your social media efforts using these plugins will definitey help kick start it into gear. So, if your blog needs a little pick-me-up consider adding some of these fantastic finds and watch your traffic and subscriber numbers soar.

1. Akismet

If your blog is the castle, then Akismet is the fortress that surrounds it. Hands down Akismet is the best anti-spam plugin available for WordPress. It’s like the ‘sorting hat‘ from Harry Potter (a reference that reveals my true geek nature) – it knows what’s good, bad and questionable in the blink of an eye. Set-up is easy and it keeps the spammers out plain and simple.

2. WP Super Cache

This plugin uses a static HTML version of your blog to reduce the browser’s load time. This means that users can view your blog more quickly and it minimizes CPU processing compared to WordPress on its own. When users experience a faster blog load time they tend to stick around longer and explore a bit more too.

3. WordPress Related Posts

Keep your blog readers interested in what you’ve written by showing them similar posts. Through a tagging identification feature, related posts are gathered and appear at the bottom of corresponding entries. Related posts are a great way to encourage your blog subscribers to delve into other topics that you’ve blogged about.

4. Disqus Comments

Pronounced discuss, this powerful comment system and moderation tool is essential for any blog. Disqus provides SEO-friendly comments, automatic backup to WordPress and accepts imports of existing comments without a hitch. A fantastic plugin that also alerts you to new comments so that you can welcome people to your blog and thank them for providing feedback.

5. Google Analyticator

Instead of having to view Google Analytic data outside of WordPress you can install this handy plugin and see it on your dashboard. You can choose from several different widgets that can be used display various analytic information in the admin section of your blog.

6. Google XML Sitemap

Another powerful plugin that helps the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com) find and index your blog is XML Sitemap. You need to index in order to be found and with the creation of a sitemap you’re making it much simpler for the crawlers to see a complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

7. FD Feedburner Plugin

Without subscribers your blog is like a compass without direction, pretty pointless. Give your readers a reason to stick around and read what you produce by creating an RSS feed (and including a subscribe button). Use this plugin for an effortless set-up that seamlessly connect your Feedburner feed and your blog together. No fuss, no muss.

8. Sociable

Choose from more than 99 different social media networks to display with your blog posts and give readers the opportunity to share with others. There are a ton of social media plugins on WordPress, but this one’s great because it’s compact, features simple settings and it connects to just about any social network that you can think of.

9. Comment Luv

A nice way to thank your blog’s comment contributors is to let them show a link to the last post from their own blog. This is a super way to help share some link juice with the people who are supporting your blog. The only downfall is that Comment Luv cannot be used in tandem with Disqus Comments. Sigh.

10. WP-Stats Dashboard

A-mazing! Display your blog’s stats graph plus your blog traffic, social engagement and social influence directly in your dashboard. See how you’re ranking on Alexa, check out your Technorati authority, monitor your ranking across multiple sites and much more. Once you install this plugin you’ll wonder how you ever managed to track your social media worth without it.

11. Post Video and Photo Galleries

An all-in-one plugin from Cincopa that let’s you add image galleries, slideshows, video, music playlists, podcasts and more to your blog. You get automatic photo resizing, video transcribing and mobile solutions for all things multimedia. This plugin can transform your blog into a visual and audible masterpiece.

12. Brokenlink Checker

Use this plugin to detect any links that are broken or missing from posts, pages, blogrolls and custom fields. It even seeks out missing images and alerts you when it finds them. As your blog grows and you’re connecting more and more internal pages with one another, as well as external, this plugin can be an enormous help in maintaining a clean and error free blog for your readers.

13. Platinum SEO Pack

The uber popular All-in-One-SEO plugin is good, but Platinum SEO is even better. Download this plugin and optimize your website with all the awesome features of All-in-One plus a few extras like generating SEO-relevant metadata, avoid duplication of content and optimize page and post titles for better visibility among the search engines.

14. SEO Friendly Images

Don’t overlook the power of images used in your blog. They can be a boon to your search engine rankings if you take the time to optimize the ALT and TITLE attributes. Using keywords in these two fields allow search engines to pull your blog up when user searches for a certain image or phrase. This plugin makes managing your images easy as pie.

15. Revision Control

For every change, edit or update that you make to a blog post, WordPress saves a backup. These revision backups can multiply quickly and turn the size of a small single post into a large file. The Revision Control plugin let’s you restrict the number of revisions to only the most recent few.

16. PostMash – Custom Post Order

WordPress lists your blog posts in chronological order, but sometimes you might find that you’d like to have a bit more control on how posts are ordered. That’s where PostMash comes in. This little plugin let’s  you customize the order of your posts with a drag-and-drop feature. Let’s say you wrote a popular post that you want to display prominently and continuously above all newly created posts – PostMash can make that happen.

17. No Self Pings

When you internally link articles and posts to each other within your blog it creates pings. Unfortunately, these pings hit your comment area and it can make it frustrating to track external pingbacks compared to the ones that you’ve generated on your own. This plugin stops the self pings so that you’re left with a trail of pings generated purely from your fans.

18. Post Ideas

You never know when inspiration is going to grab you and feed you with an idea for a new blog topic. Use Post Ideas to manage your thoughts, sort your ideas and track them through keywords and research URLs. It comes complete with edit, delete and write options so that your ideas stay organized.

Social media overdrive and can cause social media overload. The dizzying speed of communication on social media platforms makes it tough to keep up with. It doesn’t matter if you’re purely a Facebook user, a die-hard Digg fanatic, a LinkedIn addict or someone who uses all three, streamlining your updates and postings through one source can be a liberating experience.

Fortunately, social media aggregation tools are becoming increasingly popular. Through online applications, widgets and desktop software, social media aggregators help condense your live updates and shares by providing a single location to broadcast multiple updates to.

So, give your thumbs a rest and step away from your Twitter account (we’ve heard that Bag Balm is good for calluses). Take a look at some of the social media aggregation tools that are currently available and start freeing up some of your time.

Hootsuite

Not only is this one of the most robust tools available, but Hootsuite is continually improving it’s interface and capabilities. This means that features you wish it had are probably only a month or two away from being implemented. This tool is web-based so there’s no messy installation involved. Online access lets you login to your account from any location to update and monitor – very convenient.

Hootsuite users are able to connect to multiple social media accounts from the application’s dashboard. Presently, there’s support for Twitter, Facebook Pages, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress.com, MySpace and Foursquare – quite a line-up. Hootsuite is packed with features that enable you to customize, track and post in the blink of an eye.

Here’s a rundown on some of what you’ll find inside Hootsuite:

• Scheduling. Choose between live updates or pre-schedule posts and shares in advance.
• Customize URLs. Add custom link parameters for tracking clicks and gathering information on your audience.
• Files. Upload images, video and files right into your messages.
• RSS feed. Connect to your RSS and send your blog to your social media streams.
• Bookmark. Use the Hootsuite Hootlet from your browser toolbar to share pages and information quickly.
• Mobile updates. Handheld integration lets you keep up with Hootsuite from your iPhone.
• Tabbed layout. Create and customize columns that can be dragged and dropped in any order to your liking.
• Multi-column layout. Harness the clutter and organize your social streams into news, keywords, friends and more.
• Embeddable columns. Grab code from Hootsuite to embed search columns directly into your website.

It’s only fair to say that it’s our social media aggregator of choice. For others, Hootsuite is absolutely a tool worth looking into. Visit their site to read up on additional enhancements.

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Tweetdeck

Originally a popular tool for tweeters, Tweetdeck has evolved into a comprehensive platform that services Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Built using Adobe Air, it has a blend of rich-technology and customizable features that end users will enjoy using. The Tweetdeck platform is available for desktop, iPhone and iPad. It also plays well with others so you can use it on your Mac, PC or Linux system. Like other social media aggregators, Tweetdeck has a column-style format that silos your information.

Tweetdecks features are extensive:

• Custom colors. Choose how you’d like your interface to appear and make it your own.
• Filters. Set-up your columns to show you only what you want to know.
• Notification. Get alerts for new tweets, mentions and direct messages. Excellent communication management feature.
• Follower. Decide who to follow or unfollow, as well as report spam and mark your favorites.
• URL. The bit.ly auto-shorten URL is incorporated for tweets and image uploads.
• Sync. Set-up Tweetdeck to suit your personal tastes and keep it that way regardless of whether you access it through your laptop or your handheld.
• Lists. Track your favorites and organize them into Twitter lists right from your dashboard.
• Trends. See what’s hot with local trends and Twitscoop.
• Shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts speed up your actions so you can maximize your time with Tweetdeck.

Tweetdeck is a free and powerful tool that has a large following and fantastic support. As the social media universe evolves so has Tweetdeck. People will find this to be an absolutely wonderful tool that will help them get back on track with their social media efforts.

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Netvibes

Netvibes is a web-based personalized dashboard publishing tool. The easiest way to describe Netvibes would be to call it a favorite webpage on steroids. Setting it as your browser’s homepage allows users to create a customized hub that pulls all things digital into one central location. From emails received to weather updates, your Netvibes page becomes command central for everything that matters to you.

Aside from a beautiful interface, Netvibes makes it very simple to position widgets and modules exactly where you want them with built-in drag and drop capabilities. Just grab what you want with your mouse and move it to a location on your Netvibes page and you’re done. Additionally, tabs can be created to further organize and tailor your dashboard. This is a fantastic way to keep all things Facebook in one location and all things Twitter in another.

Here’s a little secret – if your employer has you on social media lock-down, you can use Netvibes to bypass the IT guards by connecting through your personalized tabs. Sneaky, sneaky!

So what can you do with Netvibes? We’ll give you a little taste below:

• Social media. Manage your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as followers and friends from central location.
• Netvibes Smart Reader. Use this RSS reader to stream all the latest feeds to you in real-time.
• Tracking. Follow dozens of blogs, activity streams and Twitter conversations all at a glance.
• Personalize. Create your own personal dashboard and enjoy the web exactly the way you like it by choosing from 100s of themes and backgrounds.
• Widgets. With one of the largest widget collections available, personalization options with Netvibes are endless. Drag and drop to your heart’s content.
• Email. Pull from web-based or POP email accounts and never miss a new message again.
• Share it. Invite friends, family, clients, co-workers or the general public to interact and view your Netvibes page.
• Infinite publishing. Multiple page publishing, WYSIWYG design tools, free hosting and full HTML support makes web everything a breeze.
• Community. Connect with other Netvibe users to expand your network and build your contact base.

Check out Netvibes and take a tour for a in-depth look at this tool.

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Yoono

Yoono is a social networking feed mashup tool. Mashup means an application or website that uses or combines information or functionality from multiple external sources to create a new service. Yoono is available as a browser add-on for Firefox or as a desktop application for Mac, Windows and Linux.

As far as social media aggregation tools go, Yoono connects you to your social networks and messengers. It unifies your status updates into a single stream of information and lets you update your status across all your social networks at once. Social media sites that are currently supported include, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and Flickr. Messenger services are available through Google Talk, AIM, Live Messenger and Yahoo Messenger.

Yoono highlights:

• Add-on or stand-alone. You can decide between integrating Yoono into your browser or featuring it on your desktop.
• Browse. Yoono is intuitive and learns what you like based on websites that you’re viewing.
• Widget. Based on the webpage you’re browsing, receive recommendations for other sites, news, videos, products, images and more.
• Social sharing. A bookmarklet allows you to share content, images and video from any site with your social network contacts.

There are similarities to other social media aggregators, like the the types of social networks you can connect to and the interface’s column layout. For someone who doesn’t need all the bells and whistles, Yoono is a great option.

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Flock

What makes Flock completely different from all the other tools reviewed is that it’s a full-fledged browser. It’s even referred to as the browser for social butterflies. Social media integration is what drives the Flock browser.

Instead of having to share login information through separate channels, it can be contained in one spot with Flock. Definitely a thumbs up for preserving online security. On the other hand, because Flock is a web-browser, you might want to consider abandoning FireFox, Safari or whatever browser you’re using, and making a complete switch, otherwise, you’ve got a browser that’s only being used for social media aggregation. That’s kinda like ordering a giant burger with the works and only eating the tomatoes.

Services included with Flock:

• Auto connection. Hook-up automatically with more than 20 of your favorite online services like Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Xanga, YouTube and more.
• Blogging. A blog editor allows you to compose blog posts online or offline for posting.
• Webmail. Instant notification of incoming messages from major webmail providers.
• People sidebar. Collect all your social media pals in one place.
• Web clipboard. Snatch, grab and collect links, images and other bits of info to share later with the clipboard feature.
• Feed reader. Centralizes all your favorite feeds into one reader to keep things organized.
• Customize it. Install your favorite FireFox extension and incorporate backgrounds and images to make Flock your own.
• Media. Quickly find and browse photos and videos from your favorite sites.

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Profilactic

Next in the web-based line-up is Profilactic. Most people have more than one social media profile and that can make it a royal pain to jump from site to site, logging in and checking to see what your friends and contacts are up to. Profilactic has turned this task into a thing of the past. The core of its design is based on bringing everything together, and we do mean everything. You can pull blogs, RSS feeds and more than 185 online social sites into your Profilactic universe!

Users interact with two functions. The first is the user’s update feed and the second is a digest of what’s occurring on all the other platforms. Pretty handy indeed. There’s also an auto-clipping component that is similar to a digital scrapbook. Auto-clipping can be used to identify, tag and track social entries about the you or your friends. Plus, you can control what updates you want to receive based on importance.

Other features that can be found on Profilactic are:

• Badges. You can take your profile information and lifestream and integrate with your website or blog with one of these.
• Clean. Regardless of how many social streams you’re pulling from, the interface is very neat and easy to navigate. Simplicity at its best.
• Lifestreaming. A true example of what lifestreaming is all about. Profilactic is a one-stop-shop that blends the whole process without a flaw.
• Post & update. Let everyone know what you’re up to. Profilactic syncs to more than 10 social sites. One update across many networks.
• Free. Doesn’t cost a penny. All you have to do is register with the site and you’re finished. It’s beyond easy.
• Convenient accessibility. Because it’s online based, you can check-in as long as you have a connection to the internet.

Discover how Profilactic can help you organize your social media habits with a quick visit to their site.

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Socialite

For Mac users who are interested in social media maintenance and aggregation, Realmac Software’s Socialite may be what you’re looking for. You get the perks of having a downloadable application with a Mac-like design, clean and slick, combined with the power of managing your social media accounts from your Mac. There is a catch (isn’t there always) – Socialite isn’t free, however it is reasonably priced at only $20 per license.

You won’t be burdened by columns or multiple windows. What you’ll find is an uncluttered application that is easy to navigate.  So what do you get with Socialite:

• Google Reader. Even if you don’t use GR you can still use the alternative RSS feed with Socialite.
• Social networks. Socialite supports Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Digg.
• HUD option. Known as the Heads Up Display, this pop-up box gives you mini-view of the status for all your peeps.

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Try Socialite out for free before you buy. The trial is a full-version and it lets you explore the functionality without having to purchase first.

What are some of the social media aggregation tools that you’re using? Any hidden gems that you’d like to share? Comment freely.