Ok so we have heard of the major social media players, Myspace, Youtube, Facebook, Linkedin, Digg, Twitter, Flickr, yada, yada, yada. Weird names but cutting edge technology. We have all have them and most are addicted. (yes, at one point, I was checking my myspace page about 10 times a day!). These site are so popular due their ease of use and of course, they are all free! At the beginning teens and young adults were creating profiles, uploading pics and videos for free expression. Then steps in the marketers and the huge opportunity presented. What a great concept.

Material created extremely cheap (man hours in most cases) and then presented to millions of potential customers. Fast forward about a year and now you have these large communities and millions of dollars pouring in for their founders. Many others, including myself want to hop on this bandwagon. Trouble is, who can compete with these global giants? well many just figured they could just expand on these applications and hopefully gain some interest. Most of the social networks have provided API’s for developers to build their own applications inside the networks which have provided more user engagement. Most don’t have a clue about any of these applications so I figured I would highlight a few as found on other blogs. They social media sites and applications that support them are:

Digg
A community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Articles are promoted to the main page at http://digg.com when they reach a certain threshold.

Digg Alerter is an absolute must have for any user interested in keeping track of their submissions.

“Digg Alerter is a program that sits in your system tray and alerts you whenever your stories are dugg or promoted to the front page. Simply specify your Digg username and the program will automatically keep you updated.”

1. Bury Recorder
   Another great tool that allows you to track buries on any given submission. This tool will display the type of bury, number of diggs at time of bury, and the time and date a bury was received.

   Bury Recorder utilizes the Digg Spy API tool, which is reported to only show a small amount of the overall Digg activity and thus could be inaccurate. It is still a great tool and very helpful.

   For additional Digg tools, check out this post by DoshDosh – 12 Must-Have Tools for Digg Users.

2. Reddit
   A community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Unlike other social sites, Reddit doesn’t have a system that promotes stories to a front page. Reddit sorts all their submissions in numerical order, based on their current voting based score. The main page on http://reddit.com shows the top 25 ranked stories.Reddit River is a mobile version of reddit.com. It is 3 times as light (in size) and automatically discovers mobile versions of stories posted on Reddit. It also supports viewing the various SubReddits.

   

   For a really good and complete article on how to succeed on Reddit, check out 10e20’s post on Reddit.

3. StumbleUpon
   A browser guided social community where users can vote web content up or down from their installed tool bar. Each time you press the “Stumble!” button, you are shown a new page, based on the categories you have subscribed to in your options.StumbleUpon Alerter is another great tool from Adamant Solutions and provides a great view at your StumbleUpon account’s activity.

   

   You can quickly see who is voting on your discoveries, and how many votes and comments each discovery has received. You can also analyze your friends’ activity and see which of your discovered domains performs better.

   Make sure to check out DoshDosh’s really comprehensive article on StumbleUpon.

4. Propeller
   Very similar to Digg in that it is a community driven social news site where users submit articles and the community votes them up or down. Articles are promoted to the main page at http://propeller.com when they reach a certain threshold.PropellerTray is a tool that allows you to see the vote and comment count on each of the content pieces you submitted to Propeller.com.
5. Twitter Service for people to quickly communicate and stay connected with other users. You can follow specific people and see their Twitter messages.

1. Twhirl is a great desktop tool for Twitter users. It allows you to do almost everything you can on Twitter but in a small window that resembles an IM chat window. In addition, the tool allows you to receive up to 3 recent Twitter messages in a quick view window similar to that of a new email in Outlook.
2. TwitterFeed allows you to publish an RSS feed into your Twitter account.

You can find some other interesting Twitter tools in Barbara Boser’s post on Twitter tools.

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2. Facebook The StumbleUpon Application allows you to share any pages you have discovered or voted upon on your Facebook profile.Digg has also released a Facebook application to display your Digg activity on your profile.

1. The Social Media tool or Firefox
   A must have additional to your social media tool arsenal. It allows you to single click buttons, at the bottom of your browser, for Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and Delicious, to easily submit whatever page you are currently on.You can also switch the tool over to “automatic” and it will display the vote counts for the various social communities next to links on any website you are browsing.

The above tools have made my social media experience much easier and more productive. There are many great tools out that can really help improve your social media experience, so get out there, tool up, and Be Social Media.