John Bickel's List: Socialmarketing

• HootSuite.com

• Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook out of his dorm room for his fellow students at Harvard. Today, toddlers to grandmothers can be found on Facebook. Strengths: Widely-adopted by large segments of the population. Weaknesses: Will the younger generation stay on Facebook once Grandma has “friended” them?
• Google+: This is the new kid on the block, but poses a serious threat to Facebook and other platforms. Why? Because it’s just so darn easy to use — the clean, simple interface makes connecting with friends, family and business associates a piece of cake. Google+ was the fastest-growing social network in history and looks as though it’s here for the long-run. Strengths: Ease-of-use and uncluttered environment. Weaknesses: Competition from other well-established social media platforms.
• LinkedIn: This is the Grand Pooh Bah of them all. They’ve been around since 2003, which, in social media terms is also known as “since the beginning of time.” Strengths: Everybody’s on LinkedIn. Weaknesses: Most people have trouble knowing what to do with LinkedIn after they upload their business information.
• Twitter: A surprisingly-successful tool that is widely-adopted and used for everything from business to fun and games. Strengths: Used by large segments of the population. Weaknesses: Can be a distraction, especially if you have Attention Deficit Disor … wow, look at that bird outside my window!
• Google: Google is technically not a social media platform, but can be used as a social tool to drive visits to your well-optimized website. Strengths: Ease-of-use and pervasiveness. Weaknesses: Are they spreading their brand across too many channels? Does this confuse people? (Answer: Probably not, but we’re struggling to come up with any weakness for Google. They’re just so darn nice, it’s hard to figure out what they’re not good at. They’re even good at not being evil, you know?)
• Flickr: This is a photo-sharing site that can be used to build awareness and drive traffic to your product pages. If you’re selling hunting rifles or tennis rackets or widgets, you’ll want to use Flickr to a) build awareness for your product and b) drive people from Flickr to your website. Strengths: Flickr is easy-to-use and has a clean user-interface. Weaknesses: Photo-sharing sites are important, but they’re not the very first thing you’ll want to work on in your social media campaign.
• Howcast: Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a website where you could watch “How To” videos on the topic of your choice? Well, there is and it’s called Howcast. It’s an extremely worthy-competitor to YouTube. Strengths: A great place to upload high-quality content. Weaknesses: The default is still YouTube. Most people are conditioned to automatically type “YouTube” into their browser
• MySpace: Ahhhhh, MySpace. They arguably started this whole social media thing to begin with. Today, MySpace is primarily used as a congregation point for younger people interested in pop culture. They’re evolving and seem to be finding a niche. Strengths: A well-known social media platform that most everybody has visited at one time or another. Weaknesses: They’re not the ubiquitous social media platform they once were.
• Yahoo: Like Google and Bing, this is not technically a social media platform. But it is a tool that ultimately can drive traffic to your website. Be sure to optimize your website so that search engines like Yahoo can see it. Strengths: Yahoo is one of the work horses of the search engine world, so it’s always a good idea to keep it on your radar screen. Weaknesses: Is Yahoo a search engine? An online portal? A web magazine? Perhaps it’s all of these things. And perhaps that’s not a weakness after all.
• YouTube: Of course, YouTube is one of the better-known platforms used to promote businesses. The key to YouTube is to keep the videos short and sweet. Make sure they solve the “what’s in it for me” equation. YouTube is perfect for “How To” videos, but it’s not a good place to upload the CEOs annual speech to shareholders. Strengths: YouTube is ubiquitous. Weaknesses: It’s a cluttered environment that can sometimes have some pretty racy videos on it. (Or so we’ve heard.)
• HootSuite: This is a tool that allows you to manage multiple social media channels through one dashboard. If you have a company with more than one contributor to your social media program, HootSuite is a good solution. Strengths: A very easy-to-use interface. Simple set-up, yet still powerful. Weaknesses: If your social media program is no more extensive than updating a Twitter account, then HootSuite would be over-kill.
• MarketMeSuite: This is a social media dashboard that’s similar to HootSuite and TweetDeck. It’s perfect for people who are interested in drilling down a little deeper than either HootSuite or TweetDeck allow you to do. You wouldn’t want to use MarketMeSuite in addition to the others, but instead of. If you need a more in-depth experience, MarketMeSuite may be just what you need.
• Pinterest: We live in a visual world and Pinterest leverages that. Tired of reading long blog posts (like this one) but still enjoy skimming through images that are worth 1,000 words? If so, then Pinterest is for you. Just visit the site, sign up and start sharing images by re-pinning them to your profile. Strengths: A visually-appealing way to share information with followers. Weaknesses: Competition from a wide variety of other social media platforms.
• Wikipedia: It still amazes us that this user-generated encyclopedia is run by just a few dozen employees (along with hundreds of thousands of contributors around the globe). It’s a great tool for legitimate entries. Don’t try to game the system by adding overly-promotional posts. But if your entry will be helpful to the Wikipedia community at large, have at it. Strengths: It’s a great tool for uploading legitimate, helpful content about your product, service or company. Weaknesses: If your target market is over the age of 40, they might struggle with Wikipedia’s miniscule type.
• Yelp: This platform offers user-generated reviews on cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play. Yelp has an augmented reality Smart Phone application that makes using it on the run a blast. Strengths: User-generated reviews are a great way for customers and prospects to find out about your business. Weaknesses: Some people try to game the system with faux reviews, but Yelp does a pretty good job of keeping those faux reviews at bay.

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• Sendible – Social media marketing platform that supports 30+ networks & services offering management of: accounts/profiles, messages & content, social contacts, content discovery, engagement, blog content & promotion, monitoring and analytics. Also offers a white label version for agencies.
• Postling – Local business social media marketing platform to create content, stay organized and reach customers. Currently free for small business or personal use.
• Seesmic – Web and desktop tools to manage social marketing activity on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google Buzz and Linkedin plus a plug-in marketplace for more social management options.

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• SocialOomph

   

  Formerly TweetLater, SocialOomph has the oft-reviled “auto-follow” functionality. Auto-following may be out of vogue with the tweeterati, but for some marketing initiatives, it is still the most appropriate policy.

   

  SocialOomph is missing the strong team management capabilities of the above platforms, but they are the ultimate solution if you are a one-person show. They also have an annoying layout, with precious screen real estate taken up by a banner ad recommending someone for you to follow, and a left nav that has a narrow font and low contrast, making it tough to read. While the back-end coding is solid, the usability of SocialOomph is hampered by these annoyances.

   

  Where SocialOomph excels is in campaign planning. All services offer a scheduling functionality to send your Tweets later. But, SocialOomph goes one step further, by offering a queue feature.

   

  You can create a queue around any theme or idea, e.g. “links worth sharing,” “retweets,” or “registration reminders.” Each queue has it’s own automated publishing schedule that you determine, e.g. “every 12 hours,” or “every 15 minutes.” Then, you can feed multiple queues into one Twitter account.

   

  This is powerful because it allows you to conceive of a persona for your account, and ensure that the account behavior is useful for the target audience; and their “email when dry” function makes it easy to see when you need to get cracking and create some more content for a queue.

   

  Cost: SocialOomph has a free plan, which is fairly limited, and a pro account that costs around $30 per month.

• WikiHow: Create a how-to guide or tutorial on wikiHow to share your company's services with the public for free.
• Wikipedia: Besides creating your own business reference page on Wikipedia, you can connect with other users on Wikipedia's Community Portal and at the village pump, where you'll find conscientious professionals enthusiastic about news, business, research and more.