The world of social media is always evolving and sometimes it’s hard to keep up.

One of the main complaints I hear is “I’d love to use social media but I just don’t have the time or resources to manage it, and I’m not sure it works anyway”.

Well now there are loads of tools to help you do just that – from scheduling content and auto-responding to analyzing and monitoring response.

Here are a few of my favourites but if you have any you’d like to share, please feel free to leave a comment below.

MentionMap:

This tool allows you to map out your network, see who you talk to most and what they’re saying. It’s great for helping you see where you get your value and providing leads for other relevant people to follow.

MediaFeedia:

Scheduling content on Twitter is fairly commonplace now and MediaFeedia provides a free tool that lets you do the same with Facebook. You can manage multiple pages, schedule content, delegate comments to team members and, very importantly, you can track analytics of past messages and reschedule future deliveries.

Conversocial:

This one is great for small businesses and if there’s just one of you managing your social media it’s free!

One of the biggest issues businesses have when using social media is the time required to stay on top of comments, conversations and updates. Well, Conversocial allows you to manage your presence without even being logged on – as well as enabling shared inboxes, keyword filtering of comments and showing you conversation histories, it will send you email alerts for comments so you can respond as soon as the comment is made if you need to, even though you’re not logged in.

Facebook Insights:

Simple, logical but often overlooked. The Facebook Insights page is there to show you how many people are participating, liking your page or leaving comments – all vital information to help you decide how to take things forward.

Hootsuite:

I love this one!

It allows you to manage multiple social media accounts, schedule your updates and generally just makes it easier to manage the day to day running of all your social media stuff.

Nutshell Mail:

Fed up of having to log on several times a day to see what’s happening with your social media? Nutshell Mail will monitor your social media activity – mentions, new followers, people who’ve stopped following etc. – and send you a summary report by email, according to the schedule you set.

Crowd Factory:

Social media is great for building relationships but you have to get people there in the first place. Crowd Factory allows you to integrate elements of your social media activity in your other digital communications to help make the most of all your marketing.

Collective Intellect:

These guys take social media analysis one step further – not only can they monitor what is being said about you and analyze the sentiment behind it, but they aim to identify some of the true influencers for your brand.

Media6Degrees:

Want to use social media to target new customers but not sure where to start? Instead of relying on geographical areas or registered interests,  tools like Media6Degrees will allow you to target customers based on what they are actually saying – by identifying people with an affinity to your brand they help you to find the people most likely to become loyal customers.

InMaps:

Are you more of a visual thinker?  For something a bit different try InMaps which can produce diagrams of your LinkedIn Connections so you can see a picture of your network rather than a list.