Tools to use in your social media campaign

There is a lot more to social media than tweets and status updates. If you are going to put together a social media strategy to build your business, it is important to embrace the diversity and complexity of social media and utilize the various tools available to you. Here are a look at the must use tools in your social media arsenal:

Press syndication and social news sites- This is a way to engage readers from around the web, and create a community of information and interaction. It allows you to stay on top of what is going on. Syndication to press and blogs as well as the use of social news sites will help you gain access to, and stay informed of trends in your industry and market, as well as allow you to submit news.

Social Bookmarking - This is going to help you stay on top of relevant content, and help build your brand and customer awareness. Some of the best social bookmarking sites include StumbleUpon and Delicious. These will help you to have real insight into the social aspect of your industry and what interests your target market.

Social Aggregation - This is a huge tool because it allows you to maintain social network profiles, blog profiles, video sharing sites, image sites and other relevant profiles all in one convenient location. Again, if you are using several social media sites, this is a great way to aggregate them and maintain your connections on all. Great services for this include: FriendFeed, Lifestyle.fm, MyBlogLog. If you intend to have a successful social media campaign an aggregate service is very useful. It will help you stay aware of your followers activity, fans, friends, etc. and not let anything relevant or important fall through the cracks in your effort to maintain several profiles.

Micro Blogging - These are the tools like Twitter, where you post micro blogs, or in other words, status updates, etc. where you stay involved in the community activity with short posts. It is a popular form of keeping in contact and relevant in your industry.

Video Production and Syndication - Social media means all kinds of media, this means video blogs, video tutorials, and more. The production of, optimization of, and syndication of video to popular video sharing sites, such as YouTube is a critical component of a social media campaign.

Image Syndication - This is great for branding, but it is also good for other things. Using tools like Snapfish, Flickr, etc. to syndicate and share images should be part of your social media campaign. When using these tools you will want to organize, tag, and optimize uploaded image content.

Learning to use the social media tools available to you will help you create a more effective social media campaign. In addition, learn to track, measure, and define the parameters of your social media tactics.