Social Media Marketing Tools

If you're putting together a social media marketing campaign, then having some useful tools that allow you to get ideas on what to focus on and find inspiration towards creating your campaign is a must. Here's a list of some that I think are helpful:

• HootSuite allows you to monitor, manage and post to multiple social networks including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare and WordPress. In addition, the service allows you to auto schedule your posts and keep your customers engaged with your social profiles even when you are in a meeting or asleep.
• Topsy is a real-time search engine that indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried.
• Quora is a collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. It is primarily used by tech savvies and professionals who are the first adapters of new technologies (if you need invited, please let me know as I have some).
• Monitter, a service that monitors Twitter mentions in real-time in a multi-column interface reminiscent of TweetDeck. Simply input a search term into a column, add or remove columns as desired, and get an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand or competing brands in your space.
• MailChimp offers list management, tracking and analysis, and custom HTML templates for up to 500 subscribers and 3000 emails a month for free.
• Get Satisfaction provides a forum where your customers can get answers to questions, solutions to problems, and submit feature and new product requests. Those answers and solutions are stored and searchable over time, cutting down on support costs and building trust with your userbase.
• Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around their content. Facebook Insights specifically analyzes trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content.

There's a lot more tools scattered over the internet, but the ones listed above are good starting points.