The 25 essential tools for a Social Media Manager

A successful Social Media Manager has to find and learn to use the tools that best serve his goals. These are the 25 essential tools that will help you become a high-performance Community Manager.

The first 15 Indispensable Tools of a Community Manager:

1. Google Reader

This is the most popular feed reader and it is the greatest source of reading material. You can keep an eye on your favorite blogs and share the posts directly to social networks, through Google Reader.

2. Google Analytics

This is the tool of choice for web analysis and statistics. You can study the visitors of your web pages, and learn how to offer more features, links, increase social media interaction, and create successful marketing campaigns.

3. Tweet Deck o Hootsuite

The two best Twitter readers are similar and are based on a system of columns. You configure these columns to sort them. This way you manage all your social networks from a single site.

4. SocialBro

Scan your community of followers and use lots of perform actions, such as: follow, unfollow, add to a playlist, etc, for users. This is the best way of refining and expanding your contacts.

5. Mailchimp

It is the most used system of mailing lists in the world. It is free for 2000 subscribers, and it offers many customization features and designs. Each of the campaigns shows detailed statistics, so you will know how many users have opened your emails.

6. Dropbox or Google Drive

You can use any storage service, but these two are the most popular ones. Keeping important files and data in a safe location that you can access anytime from anywhere is very useful.

7. Buffer

With Buffer you can schedule your posts on Twitter and Facebook. You just select the time of day when you want your posts to be published.

8. Bit.ly

This is the perfect tool to make all links shorter and easier to remember. More importantly, it gives you the ability to know how many clicks each link has received. This information is very useful in marketing campaigns.

9. Storify

Selected posts from all social networks are included in a collection. The creation of the collection is very intuitive and quick. You can put it on a blog, or a web page, and allow readers to interact with Tweets, YouTube videos and Facebook shares.

10. Feedburner

This tool offers blog owners a full subscription system, on any platform or social network with RSS. This way you can get detailed information about your RSS feeds and subscribers.

11. Stock.XCHNG

Most websites freely license photographic resources. On the internet we are continuously working with images for blogs and social networks. This tool helps you pick out great images without having to deal with copyright issues.

12. SEO Chat – SEO Tools

This is the largest collection of SEO tools and site optimization resources. Everything you need for work: monitoring the position of a website, the analysis of keywords, URLs, link analyzer, load times, site maps, meta-tags, it is all available here.

13. Google Alerts

You can use this tool to configure alerts that warn you whenever an internet search term is entered. Google Alerts is essential for tracking and monitoring everything that is being written about a product or brand.

14. Tip Adwords Keyword

This tool suggests keywords fit for your page, and analyses the relevance and competition that each keyword has. You can use Adwords campaigns to adequately choose the best words to use.

15. Ahrefs.com

This is a good SEO tool that analyses all links to your website. You can discover the dimensions of the domains that are related to yours. So you can have statistics of your evolution and progress in positioning, according to different keywords.

10 more highly recommended tools for a Community Manager:

• Alexa: It gives detailed information about websites and search engine optimisation.
• SEM Rush: It is a tracking tool for SEM campaigns and price analysis.
• Crowdbooster: You provide data about your Twitter account and Facebook page, and it will highlight your most active users.
• Social Mention: A seeker of content on various social networks simultaneously.
• Hashtracking: Analyses and displays data about participants in a given hashtag or label.
• Klout: Ranking and scoring of your activity in social networks.
• Marketing Grader: Analyses many aspects of your web page, and gives suggestions for easy improvements.
• The Archivist: Creates files every time a user Tweets, uses a term or a hashtag, and shows statistics on them.
• Likealyzer: Scans your website and Facebook; it helps you discover what content will work best for your audience.
• Google Trends: It indicates how many times a month each keyword has been searched, and it allows you to compare various terms and trends.