Buffer
There is a free version and a paid version. The free version pretty much just helps with scheduling posts and posting to multiple social networks. The paid, which I have not used, is $10/month and gives analytics. When should you post? Who is engaging with you? It also gives you content you can tweet. Which makes me think you can write content and possibly get it tweeted by others.
Crowdfire App
This is one of the best tools out there for getting new Twitter followers. It is free for one account. You can add multiple Twitter and Instagram accounts and they have said they are going to add more social networks. The basic strategy with this app is to follow your target market and then every few weeks unfollow the people that didn’t follow you back. The app shows you people you follow that don’t follow you. You can look at other accounts and see a list of their followers or who they are following and quickly follow the accounts you want. You can “whitelist” accounts you want to make sure to never unfollow. You can search for accounts by topic and location. You can also see who is active and who isn’t and unfollow accounts that are not active. They also make an app called “Publish” to help with publishing content.
Followerwonk
This is part of the Moz suite and helps manage followers. Want to see who you are following that isn’t following you? Want to see who follows you that is the most influencial? Want to see who you follow that Tweets to most? You can sort and filter your followers and people you are following on all kinds of stuff. If you want to get rid of people that don’t follow you back, this tool is awesome. Moz costs at least $100/month.
Hootsuite
I think Hootsuite started out as a Twitter client. In other words, you could manage mutiple accounts, schedule tweets, and monitor keywords. It has become much more than that. There is a free version but they also have a $9.99/month edition that boasts 50 social profiles, 1 enhanced analytic report, advanced message scheduling, 1 team member, unlimited RSS feeds, and more. There are several options in this space.
Klout
OK. Klout has a bad name. It basically quantifies your social influence by looking at feedback such as Likes, Shares, Retweets, clickthroughs, and who knows what. You get a score between 1 and 100. So many think it is just a vanity index. Not so fast! I think the real value of this site is finding influencers on topics you care about. Say, for instance, you want to see who the biggest Dallas influencers are, you can look at that topic page. You can also see content that is doing well for that topic. Granted, it is what a machine thinks is doing well, but you can get a sense of what people engage with.
Nimble
Nimble is the social CRM. A CRM is a customer relationship manager. Think Salesforce but for social. You can import contacts from email, Social networks and other systems and create a list of contacts. What I really like about this is you can see everything you need to know about a person….or at least what Nimble can gleen from their social accounts, which for some people is a ton. You can see what they have said lately. You can see when people engage with you and it helps you engage with them. They used to have a free version but now it is $15/month/user. If you don’t have a CRM, this is a relattively inexpensive way to keep track of contacts and your conversations on social networks.
Publish
This is similar to Hootsuite but works with the Crowdfire App and is mobile based. You can schedule content based on a time you select or based on when Publish thinks will be best. You can add photos and publish to multiple accounts and platforms from one tool. So you can post a pic to Instagram and then later Tweet about that image on Twitter. Or post a Tweet to a couple Twitter accounts. If you manage multiple Twitter or Instagram accounts, this is great. This is made by Codigami Technologies (the people that make the Crowdfire App) and you will probably not want to use this unless you are already using Crowdfire.
Radian6
This is Salesforce.com ‘s social marketing suite. Here is a video showing what they do. It’s not cheap, though. This is probably something you would want if you are managing social for a big brand.
Simplymeasured
They have free reports but the main product runs about $500/month, which I haven’t paid. The free report analyzed my Twitter followers, but I wasn’t all that impressed.
Tweetdeck
Twitter’s own Twitter client. Manage multiple accounts, schedule tweets, add photos, follow multiple streams, ect. They have free desktop clients for both Mac and Windows.