The right tools for the right tasks: how to find good social media tools
The idiom goes “bad workers always blame their tools”. Yet you wouldn’t use a 1980’s PC tower, so you shouldn’t use an outdated social media tool either. So if you find yourself blaming your tools over and over again then you need to learn the skills to find the right tools. By utilising some very basic principles you should be able to find a number of social media tools that should solve almost all of your everyday tasks. Some of these techniques you may already use and others you may never thought of using, yet all of them can be used to find the extension or program that you really need.
Google Search – Everyone uses Google, so it’s a good place to start. This is a bit of an obvious technique, so I won’t go into too much detail but basically search for terms such as “social media tools”, “List of social media tools”, “free social media tools”, “social media Chrome extensions”, etc. Some relevant results that I found include: 10 little known social media tools, 50 free social media tools and 13 tools to simplify social media
Chrome Web Store – Again, this is a pretty simple solution. Just search for “Social media”, “Twitter”, “Facebook”, etc. Some of the tools that I have found using this technique include: Social analytics and Pinterest right click.
Twitter Search – As you know people share links and tools on a daily basis, via Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Google+. So all you need to do is perform a search on Twitter using the right keywords, for example Social media tool, and see what results you can find. The only problem with this technique is that it might take some time to find what you are looking for, as you will have to scour through the Twitter stream until you find something useful. So I prefer to use…
Social Search Tools – By using social tools, such as topsy.com, you can find a range of different tools, what’s more you can see how many times a link has been tweeted which is an indicator of the quality of the tool. If you go to topsy.com and search for Social media tools then should be able to see a range of the different tools that people are tweeting about. Alternatively, you can find lists of different tools by using listorious.com, try searching for Twitter tools and see what you can find. One of the best results I found recently was a list of Twitter Tools and Devs.
Google Alerts – By making use of Google alerts you can be notified of the latest tools as soon as they become available on the web. Try setting up Google alerts for terms such as “social tool”, “social media tool” and “Twitter tool”. You will undoubtedly get updates about existing tools and you may find a lot of tools that don’t meet your standards but every now and again you may just find a gem. Good luck in your search.
