Key Features

• Schedule Google+ business page posts
• Repost content to other Google+ pages, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and App.net
• Team support – it includes functionality to allow your team to share out content also
• There is teams/organizations functionality which is suitable for teams managing social media
• Reports/analytics are but this is limited if you are on the free version.

Suitable For

If you are an active Google+ user and you want to use this as your main platform Friends+Me will help you share the content out to other platforms.

Pricing

Price starts at $5 per month

Key Features

• Create 2D animated videos, whiteboard animations or infographic videos
• Automatic lip syncing with either a recording of your own voice or you can choose from a library of pre-recorded voices
• Import your own media
• Choose from a vast library of characters, backgrounds, styles, settings, props and actions
• Publish directly to YouTube

Our Opinion

Wow this is a fun app to play with but also a useful one. You can get animated videos up and running pretty quickly or you could use some of the advanced features and build a real fancy one! Either way, it’s pretty useful.

Pricing

Starting price is $39 per month.

Key Features

• Automated sharing so you can create a queue that is continuously shared.
• Supports Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
• Create your posting schedule, add content and let Edgar do the rest
• Data and reports on visitor behavior and characteristics to really understand your audience
• Information on audience browsers, location, platform and flow
• Integrates with Google AdWords to measure and optimize campaign performance
• Dashboards to manage different Analytics tasks
• Audience segmentation, real-time reporting and custom reports
• Sentiment monitoring and trending topics analytics
• Universal Analytics to connect online and offline customer behavior
• Applications, plugins and software can integrate with the Google Analytics API so you can access your data in whichever way suits you best
• Analytics for mobile apps
• Integration with AdWords, AdSense, Google Display Network, Google Tag Manager, Google+ and Wildfire
• Measure sales and conversions with attribution data, eCommerce reporting, goals and multi-channel funnels
• Site speed analysis, event tracking, site search and more.

Our Opinion

Don’t leave home without Google Analytics! It’s an essential app to measure results from social traffic to your website.

Pricing

Free!

Key Features

• Find out the number of pages actually indexed on your site compared to what was submitted
• View any errors related to your site. For example, there could be title tags that are duplicate, missing pages that Google has identified, etc
• View any sitemap errors that Google finds. The sitemap is a file on your website which tells Google about all the pages on your website so that Google can find and index them
• View details of search phrases that were used to find your content and the results

Our Opinion

Everyone should use this tool to figure out what problems Google experiences when it is crawling through your site.

Pricing

It’s free.

Key Features

• 40 metrics returned for every blog which gives you a ton of valuable information to help you make a decision for your short list
• Tracking and reporting of results of any outreach campaign
• Activity history recorded on outreach activities on any particular blogs

Our Opinion

A really useful blogger research tool to find the best bloggers out there. However, it’s expensive so you’d want to make sure you allocate the time to get sufficient benefit from it. Blogger outreach would have to be a really important part of what you do.

Pricing

Key Features

• View top influencers, top tweets, timing of tweets, etc.
• Directory of very useful applications you can use to add on functionality to the platform
• Hashtag analytics provided on other hashtags mentioned also with the main hashtag selected
• Shareable and embeddable infographics based on the hashtag analytics
• All reports are exportable.

Our Opinion

If you want to do analytics on hashtags to figure out things like who are the key influential users using the hashtag this is very useful.

Pricing

You can sign up for a free 30 day trial and price starts at $29 per month.

Key Features

• Drag and drop any elements you want to create your customized competition
• Integrates with a variety of email vendors so competition entrants can become subscribers
• Supported on the desktop and on mobile

Our Opinion

Heyo is a reasonably priced product that is easy to set up. If you want to get a competition up and running quickly you’ll set this up in a couple of minutes. We ran a competition using it a couple of months ago and were very pleased with the results.

Pricing

Price starts at $25 monthly (billed annually).

Key Features

• Suggests keyword combinations to consider for blog posts. These suggestions are all ranked from 0 to 5 stars
• A ‘To Do’ list, which is a list of articles you plan to write, keywords you want to mention, or a place to link to relevant articles with these keyword combinations
• Detailed information on the keywords you already get traffic for
• Users can include an unlimited number of domains
• Real-time reporting tools
• Email alerts with keyword suggestions
• Keyword data can be exported to Excel

Our Opinion

This provides you with a long list of keyword combinations but most of them are not relevant. But if you sort through the list you can pick up some valuable keyword combinations that you may not have thought of.

Pricing

Price plans start at $9.95 a month for 350 keywords. Fees go up to $79.95 a month for 4,000 keywords and additional functionality.

Key Features

• Browser plugin which enables you to click a button and add content to the Hootlet queue
• Content can be automatically sent out based on predefined times or sent out based on times Hootsuite will know will do well based on previous performance

Our Opinion

If you’re looking for an alternative to Buffer this is worth considering.

Pricing

Good free offer, full functionality available when you have Hootsuite professional (starting price $10 per month).

Key Features

• Support for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other platforms
• There is an application directory of very useful applications you can use to add on functionality to the platform
• Supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other platforms
• There is teams/organizations functionality which is suitable for teams managing social media
• Reports/analytics are available but this is limited if you are on the free version.

Our Opinion

Any business that wants to manage social media and doesn’t have a good budget. It’s low cost with a very good free option and it supports a lot of functionality.

Pricing

There is a free option but the pro option starts at $25 per month.