Article in Social Media

Social media is the new game in town, and there are already numerous tools that make your life a lot easier for you to bookmark sites, view and analyze bookmarks, and more. In this article, I'll discuss the better tools that I use in my daily social media activities.

1. StumbleUpon is a toolbar that embeds within Firefox and IE that lets you discover sites that you're interested in. When you first sign up, you tell the site what your interests are, usually by category or even by tag. Then, you can start hitting the Stumble button and the tool feeds you sites that you may like. If you really do like the content, hit "I like it!", and if you don't, hit the "thumbs down" button. My favorite part of StumbleUpon is that I've discovered some extraordinarily valuable content through the network. More than that, I've also been able to network with people, which is a huge part of the phrase "social" media. StumbleUpon now boasts nearly 5 million members and the usage is very heavy. If you ask me, StumbleUpon sends the most traffic of all the social networks combined. That will, of course, be discussed in a later article.

2. Since most of us use bookmarking to an extent, the del.icio.us bookmarks embeds buttons onto your Firefox toolbar that lets you easily tag pages and view your del.icio.us page. Since just about everyone is bookmarking on del.icio.us nowadays, this is a great way to do so rapidly without having to open your personal del.icio.us page. I personally find myself using it regularly a few times a day.

3. Social Media for Firefox is a tool built by the 97th Floor SEO firm that lets you see how many votes a particular website has on four social networks: Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious. If you like the content, you can submit it to one of the other social networks or you can vote upon it within the networks. The idea of this tool is to "cross pollinate" your submissions -- look at content that does well on one social network and submit it to another. By doing this, you can build strong accounts on other social networks simply by looking at what people like.

4. Smart Digg button is my favorite Digg tool as it shows you how many Diggs a specific page has right within your status bar. The reason why I like this is because I can click on the button and it takes me directly to the Digg submission where I can vote upon it (or submit it if it hasn't yet been submitted). Also, I know exactly when Digg is down because the tool shows "Checking..." instead of "# of diggs" in the toolbar. For Digg addicts, this is a must-have.

5. Digg This is a Firefox plugin that adds a "Digg this" list item to your right-click menu on the browser. The bonus of this over the Smart Digg button is that if you highlight text on the page and hit "Digg this," it will move that content over to the submission page and you won't have to worry about copying and pasting the title and description. Digg This does that for you.

These are my five favorite social media tools and I will admit without hesitation that I use them regularly. What are your favorite tools for social media and why?

by tamar