3 New Apps to Manage Your Social Networks
Are you looking for a better way to manage all of your social accounts?
With the growing number of social networks, it can be a pain to keep on top of them all.
Below I’ve highlighted three tools to help you manage your various social networking accounts from one neat dashboard.
#1: Alternion
Just recently out of private beta testing, Alternion packs a punch with the number of networks and social profiles you can manage.

Each profile or account is added by logging into the original site and allowing Alternion to access your account.
4 Steps to Create a Social Listening Strategy
Is your business thinking about social analytics?
The first step when considering social analytics is to establish a listening strategy.
In social media, listening acts as a guide through the ever-changing and interesting world of the blogosphere.
Why? Because listening is an ongoing process that is necessary to keep a strategy fresh and competitive. It enables decision-makers to find and better understand opportunities and stakeholders.
So, exactly how do you go about listening?
#1: Determine your target audience
Once an organization has determined whom to target, it’s critical to understand where to engage them online. A common misperception is that all social networks are the same and therefore everyone is on the same platform. 
6 Ways to Measure Your Social Media Results
How much time are you spending on social media? Can you tell if it’s helping sales?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a framework for measuring the impact of your social media efforts?
That’s where Susan Etlinger’s new research for the Altimeter Group comes into play. Susan did qualitative research with 60 social media marketers and vendors to understand how businesses currently measure their social media performance.
Her goal: to develop a framework for tying social media performance to business goals.
NOTE: Because Susan’s original research targeted enterprise-level companies, I interviewed her to add some small business insights. The following comments combine results of the research and that interview. 
How a Scrapbooking Company Used Social Media to Beat Target as Best Brand in Minnesota
On the morning of June 10, Kristen Jacobs was monitoring the Twitterverse for mentions of her employer, Creative Memories, as she usually does. One tweet in particular stood out.
Upon closer inspection of the tweet and link, Jacobs discovered that Creative Memories was going head-to-head with one of America’s biggest retailers, Target, in a “Minnesota Brand Madness” challenge put on by the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal.

Creative Memories learned first on Twitter that it was included in the Minnesota Brand Madness competition.
This was news to Jacobs (the company’s web content community manager), as well as the rest of the scrapbooking company. But Jacobs knew where to turn first. 
4 Free Tools to Help You Socially Monitor Your Brand
Do you know what people are saying about your brand? Do you want to know how to monitor these conversations?
Regardless of the size of your business, chances are good people are talking about you and your brand via social networks and blogs. In this article I’ll cover four free monitoring tools to help you get started.
Getting Started: How do people talk about you?
A good place to find how people know and speak of your brand is to look at the keywords and phrases they use to find your website.
You can find these metrics in the analytics package you’re using with your website. If you’re not using an analytics package like Google Analytics, Webtrends or Clicky, then brainstorm keywords and phrases that you may have heard clients/customers use in discussions you have had with them. 
12 Social Media Tools Recommended by the Pros
Are you struggling to make social media work for your business? Sometimes a few well-chosen tools are all you need to get your social media marketing working for you.
In our recent Social Media Success Summit, there were presentations that covered all the key topics you need to make your social media marketing easy. In this article, I’ll share 12 of those tools that were recommended by the pros.
Tools to Refine Your Visibility and Engagement
Here are three tools recommended by Mari Smith during her first presentation on increasing your visibility and engagement on Facebook. 
Social Media Monitoring Tools: This Week in Social Media
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up-to-date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Oneforty and KISSmetrics Publish Cool Infographic on Social Media Monitoring: Their infographic is based on a survey of 150 social media professionals. It provides a list of popular social media monitoring tools and insights into how marketers use them. Check out the useful data below. 






