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By Jamie Turner, CEO, 60 Second Communications

There are hundreds of different Social Media tools available, so it’s easy to get confused by all of them. One of the key concepts we discussed was how to categorize these tools so that they’re simpler and easier to use and understand.

There are three primary categories of Social Media — tools that help you network, tools that help you promote and tools that help you share content.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we consider to be the top 13 Social Media tools broken down by category:

Networking tools — These are tools that help you connect with customers and prospects:

• MySpace: Think of MySpace as a social media tool that’s a little like a music festival. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of passion and, unfortunately, a lot of noise. It’s great if you’re targeting the youth market.

• Twitter: Think of Twitter as a cocktail party. There are a lot of different conversations going on and you can move from one conversation to another conversation.

• Facebook: Facebook is like a pub. It’s a great place to meet people on a more casual basis and have relaxed, off-the-record conversations with the people you meet there.

• LinkedIn: Think of LinkedIn as a trade show. It’s a little more professional than Facebook and you’ll want to meet and connect with people there in a more businesslike manner.

Promotion Tools — These are tools that help you promote content about your product or service:

• Flickr: A great place to upload photos of your most recent company parties, conventions or product launches. Not the most important tool in the world, but worth checking out.

• Podcasting: Don’t make the mistake of doing a podcast that just regurgitates your press releases. Make your podcasts fun, interesting and relevant. Don’t waste your time if you’re just going to have the CEO ramble on about your latest new product launch.

• YouTube: What can we say about YouTube that you don’t already know?

• HowCast: Ahhhhh, here’s something that’s interesting. HowCast feeds “How To” videos to a growing community. Perfect if your product requires a video tutorial.

• TubeMogul: Do you have videos you want to share with the world? Then go to Tubemogul, where you can upload your video once and let them send it out to YouTube, MySpace, Vidder and a gazillion other video sharing services.

Sharing tools — These are tools that help you share content that would be helpful to your prospects or customers:

• Google: You already know about Google, but did you know about Google Alerts? Just plug in a keyword and Google will send you an email a day that lists when that keyword was discussed in a blog. Perfect if you’re interested in staying on-top of things. Also great if you’re a big brand and you want to respond to negative comments about your product or service.

• Blogs: We’re going to do an entire webinar on blogs and blogging in the coming weeks, but for now, remember this — don’t do one unless you can write something relevant at least 4 times a week.

• Article Marketer: Do you have articles that you’d like published around the web? Then check out Article Marketer. We haven’t officially used it, but at first glance, it looks like a very useful tool.

• Digg, Del.icio.us and other bookmarking tools: As you know, these tools allow you to tag articles and other content that you think might be useful for others. We’ve found that it’s best not to abuse these tools or to try to milk them. That’s just abusing the system.

 

Jamie Turner is the CEO of 60 Second Communications. He's also the Chief Content Officer for the 60 Second Marketer an online magazine for the marketing community.

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