Tweetbeep: Twitter alerts via email

1Tweetbeep is essentially Google Alerts for Twitter. Whenever you’re mentioned on Twitter, you’ll get sent an email with details of that mention. You  can specify any search term you want. This is great for people who are not ready for the power of Tweetdeck of HootSuite with all their bells and whistles. Twitter is the most real-time account you have of what people are saying about you, so it’s really important to have a Twitter listening tool that matches your comfort level.

Tweetdeck: Your command center

2Tweetdeck is great because it runs in the background and gives you desktop alerts for mentions, similar to Microsoft Outlook when you get a new email. You can customize the different columns and have an array of search terms for people talking about you on Twitter. For example, mine has the following columns: @ replies of my personal Twitter account, @ replies of my organizational account, mentions of “humane society,” mentions of “hsus” and direct messages. When you’re ready to get real serious, ask your IT department for a second monitor that you can put just Tweetdeck on. (See photo at top.)

Kurrently: Check your public persona

3It is amazing, and scary, how many people still do not lock down the privacy on their Facebook profiles. That’s what makes Kurrently so useful: It’s a search engine for public Facebook updates. It actually now pulls in a lot more than Facebook updates, but that’s what I find it most useful for.

Twitalyzer: Turn monitoring into metrics

4It is very important to think about your goals and how you’re going to measure success when diving into a new online venture, and listening is no different. There are many tools out there for measurement, but I like Twitalyzer, because of the breadth of statistics it provides and its ease of use. The graphs are pretty, too. It provides data such as number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, top hashtags, number of mentions, etc – which are great metrics. For Facebook, check out their built-in analytics for your fan page.

Google Alerts: Trusty standby is still critical

5You’ve been using Google Alerts for some time now, right? At the bare minimum, you should use Google Alerts for your organization’s name, acronym, prominent staff names like your CEO or executive director and large campaigns you’re working on. Depending on the number of mentions you get, you’ll probably want to set the alerts to come to your in-box as they happen so you know quickly what’s being said and can determine a response, if needed.

CoTweet: Proactive marketing solution

1 CoTweet is a powerhouse for Twitter accounts when you have multiple team members tweeting. It allows for scheduling, tracking and adding notes. Nonprofits can manage up to six Twitter accounts for free using the Standard edition. The ability to track past conversations is a great utility to remind you where you stand with each contact. You can also assign specific people to on-duty status. The Enterprise edition costs about $1,500 per month and is worth it for medium to large organizations. With this edition, you can manage campaigns, assign tasks and integrate the tool with third-party apps such as Salesforce.com. On the other hand, the interface is lacking and the analytics could be better. It also allows for Facebook management.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile

MediaFunnel: The app for team tweeting

2 Media Funnel allows for more of your staff to be involved with the tweeting process. It supports multiple user types — admins, publishers, contributors and guests — and tweets can be placed in a queue for editorial review by a publisher or administrator. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported. This tool also integrates with Salesforce.com, Zendesk, Twilio and Klout. The free plan allows for two users and no brand monitoring, while the standard plan offers many features and costs $1 per user per month or $1 per social media account, whichever is greater.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Desktop, iPhone, Android, Blackberry

Timely: Make your tweets count

3Timely analyzes your past 199 Twitter updates to determine what times during the day people are most likely to read your posts. You can schedule tweets to go live at those times and can use the bookmarklet to tweet links without leaving your current page. You can tweet right away or add the message to your queue. It’s free.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Klout: Measuring online influence

4 Klout offers a daily summary of your organization’s or team members’ social media influence, with a ranking that factors in your reach and impact on Twitter (metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships, unique mentions), Facebook and LinkedIn. Klout has an open API that’s integrated into many Twitter apps: More than 750 partners use Klout data, including Hootsuite, CoTweet and Attensity 360. For the end user, its analytics platform is rich and easy to use, even if the methodology used in spitting out a Klout Score is a bit opaque.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web-based, iPhone (Social Score), Android

Twylah: Branded pages for your Twitter account

5Twylah creates one page that sums up your nonprofit brand. This custom page automatically organizes your tweets into topics that you tweet about most often. Users can interact on your page by retweeting and responding to messages. The biggest benefits this tool brings are for SEO. Google no longer indexes tweets, but it does index each Twylah page and the tweets within it, giving your tweets a longer life. It also offers PowerTweets, which creates a separate landing page for your tweets with other recommended messages. It’s good to use this for blog posts, but if you do it too much, you might annoy your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Qwitter: Find out who unfollows you

6Qwitter lets you know when someone stops following you after your last tweet, so you can identify what might have made them unfollow you. This free tool automatically e-mails you when someone unfollows you. If you’re a nonprofit and you tweet about sports and then three people immediately unfollow you, you might want to keep your messages more on topic.
Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

LiveIntent: Cultivate your following

7With its Discovery Window, LiveIntent lets you turn static social media Follow Us buttons into dynamic windows on your site. The start-up says the intent is to grow your following and fans, while improving SEO and driving additional revenues from “sponsored introductions,” which are based on common interests and level of engagement. The window dynamically adjusts recommendations for each user and each page.

Rating: ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Twitpay: Send and receive money via Twitter

8Twitpay is a simple, secure way to enable your supporters to make donations to your cause and to quickly spread the word. It’s free to use use, however, it does charge a percentage of the donations actually paid including a small fee per transaction. They say they have over 45 nonprofit clients including CARE, the National Wildlife Federation and the Children’s Miracle Network.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

Optify: Marketing solutions for the real-time web

9Optify is robust business management tool that lets you set up real-time alerts to track specific keywords and provides useful insight into your social media activity. You can create and track Twitter campaigns, and it gives insight into how well visitors from Twitter convert into leads. Optify also offers many other optimization tools to find keywords, improve your website and more. The free edition only allows for one user and tracks five keywords. The basic version costs $99 per month and allows you to track up to 250 keywords. The professional version is $500 per month and allows for 10 users and 2,000 keywords.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

JustCoz: Increasing awareness about your causes

10 An online relay system built for charities and nonprofits, JustCoz gives Twitter users the ability to donate a tweet a day to help raise awareness for causes. Once someone signs up, a tweet will automatically be sent from their account once per day with your customized message. This tool can help raise awareness for a campaign, however, all messages go out at once and you only have the option to send the same message to all of your followers.

Rating: ★ ★ ★
Platforms: Web

AppMakr: Make your own iPhone app

1AppMakr is a browser-based platform designed to make creating your own iPhone app quick and easy. Its free drag and drop tool enables anyone to build rich content-based apps using a point-and-click solution. AppMakr connects to existing RSS and social networking feeds for easier app integration. You can monitor downloads, create image galleries and post alerts to keep all of your users updated. Then AppMakr allows you to gather feedback on your app before publishing.

Peerindex: Measure social influence

2PeerIndex uses an algorithm to map influence on the social Web. The free service gives users influence rankings in predetermined categories so that, for example, nonprofits can determine which Twitter users exert the most sway in a given sector. A similar service is Klout.

RowFeeder: Free monitoring & analysis

3RowFeeder is the latest tool for social media monitoring and analysis. The free service makes it easy to input data and track keywords, hashtags or user names on Twitter and Facebook. And RowFeeder’s reports are compatible with Excel, allowing you to present your data professionally and easily.

Quixey: Find apps that do what you want

4Quixey is a functional search engine for applications. If you’re looking for an app but can’t put your finger on its name or description, you can use Quixey to search apps based on their functionality. Quixey produces the most relevant search results by searching blogs, forums, social media and other sources to learn about each app.

Panabee: Generate relevant domain names

5Panabee is a brainstorm engine for domain names. Its domain-name generator sifts through popular spellings and word pairings. Although many domain registrars have domain-name spinners that offer similar capabilities, Panabee’s specialty is in providing suggestions and phonetic variations of the domain name/phrase you’re interested in by querying Facebook, Twitter and the Web.

Bufferapp: Be awesome on Twitter

6Bufferapp offers a smarter way to schedule tweets. First, plan the tweets you want to share throughout the day. After you fill up your “Buffer” with your planned tweets, Buffer will schedule your tweeting day for you.  Simply keep that Buffer topped up and you’ll be an effortless 24/7 tweeting machine. Note: Other services, like Hootsuite and CoTweet, also let you schedule tweets for free.

Metricly: Aggregate your data in one place

7Metricly helps you stay on top of your organization. It aggregates your data from all over the Web, allowing you to compare and combine all of your metrics in one place. With pre-built connectors to over a dozen of the most popular online services that nonprofits and businesses use today, all you need to do is connect the data sources you use and Metricly will automatically synchronize your latest data in your dashboards.

Website Grader: Measure your site’s success

8How well is your website doing? Is it getting traffic? How popular is it in social media? Every Web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. With Website Grader,check out how you compare to similar websites and monitor your traffic rank and see if your optimizations and new content are showing benefits. You will be able to draw conclusions from your competitors and other sites that are related to your business.

Heardable: How is your brand stacking up?

9Heardable allows organizations to understand how well their brand is performing onsite and offsite, and compare their scores with thousands of other brands in your location, sector, industry or worldwide. Heardable can provide key insights, such as which tools and services your competitors and peers are using, and show you how you can more effectively compete with them.

Fablistic: Save & share your opinions

10Fablistic is a social network for personal opinions. This simple website lets you save all your personal opinions in one place, share your opinions with friends on Facebook, Twitter or email, and discover new products and places from people you trust. Use it to save and share your opinions on books, blogs, fundraisers, events, restaurants, stores, shows, anything!

Threadsy: Unify your email, social networks

1Threadsy is an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard that allows organizations to connect through multiple email accounts as well as Facebook and Twitter. Free to use, Threadsy is great for managing your nonprofit or business’s brand from one clean dashboard across the big names in social media platforms. With no fees and no downloads, this service should make a splash in the space for both personal use and use by your organization.

Myweboo: Organize your information streams

2Haven’t heard of Myweboo? That’s OK. This upstart startup invites users to discover, browse and read popular streams and share them with friends and followers. You or your organization can choose from a wide variety of “applications” to connect to and stream to a dashboard from categories like news, social, fashion, photo and video. These streams can be viewed together of filtered from “My Dashboard” and then easily shared via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious and other networks. You’re in complete control of which sites will make up your dashboard. Free to use, Myweboo is run by an appealing brother-and-sister pair of young tech stars.

Hootsuite: Integrate all your platforms

3Our personal favorite is Hootsuite because of the depth of its products and services. Nonprofits and cause organizations can update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and more) from a computer or iPhone, Android or BlackBerry device. A team of users can track results of their interactions and create a dashboard that will work efficiently with their preferred social streams. Hootsuite offers two versions. One is free and aggregates up to five social network and two RSS feeds; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For $5.99 a month, your organization can enjoy unlimited capabilities for a single user, with each additional user costing $10 per month.

Spredfast: For teams of social marketers

4Spredfast allows an organization not only to manage its social media presence but also to monitor and measure its voice across multiple social media channels from one easy-to-use dashboard. A great choice for organizations with multiple hands in social media marketing efforts, Spredfast offers superb organizational tools that help identify and assign tasks to multiple users across multiple social media sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and blogging platforms. It also lets you publish video to many video sites at once, similar to TubeMogul. Free for 30 days, Spredfast has pricing tiers that start around $212 per month for nonprofits. See the new writeup on Spredfast on our sister site, Socialmedia.biz.

MediaFunnel: Collaborative, permission-based system

5Coordinate and manage your nonprofit’s social media presence with MediaFunnel, a collaboration platform that lets you navigate and moderate online conversations about your brand. One interesting feature: You can use MediaFunnel to manage your team member’s social media updates — say, by holding your intern’s tweets in a queue until approved by a supervisor (roles include admins, publishers and contributors). Chiefly geared to businesses, MediaFunnel makes it easy to combine several social media accounts and to offer solutions for presenting a brand’s presence through multiple voices. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported.

CoTweet: Advanced features for Enterprise users

6CoTweet is used by thousands of individuals and employees at nonprofits and corporations around the world. The free Standard edition is limited to a few Twitter accounts and geared to a couple of team members. The paid Enterprise edition supports Facebook, too, and is geared to brands more deeply engaged in social marketing, brand building and customer support. It supports an unlimited number of users, advanced workflow, more analytics, third-party integrations — including Salesforce.com — productivity tools, unlimited conversation history for deeper customer relationships, a mobile app, rich profiles of fans and followers and more.

Seesmic: Free, clean & credible

7Seesmic allows users to manage unlimited Twitter accounts as well as Facebook, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and Foursquare accounts. Another free service, this dashboard is well-organized and can be sorted into a variety of timelines detailing tweets, retweets, @mentions, direct messages and lists. Seesmic also publishes trending topics, making it easy to join already popular conversations. This dashboard — created by Loic Le Meur, founder of LeWeb, and his San Francisco-based team — is clean, simple and affords the ability to update several statuses, send direct messages and check in to locations from one easily navigated page.

Netvibes: Share your widgets with the world

8Netvibes lets organizations keep track of the news and trends that matter, create unique personal and public dashboards and share these public dashboards or sites with anyone, anywhere, at any time. You can easily create fun and personalized widgets — detailing the weather, to-do lists, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts or Flickr updates, among many others — and post them to both personal and public dashboards. Organizations can choose a theme, name their pages and organize them with tabs and share them with the world.

TweetDeck: Connect with your contacts

9If you’re a Twitter aficionado, you may already use TweetDeck, which works on the Mac, PC, Linux, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. It connects organizations with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and many more. Free of charge, TweetDeck allows users to schedule future posts, manage multiple accounts and update several social media sites at once to maintain consistency. One unique feature allows users to send tweets longer than 140 characters through smart cross-posting to both a Buzz and Twitter account. Twitter is a desktop app and not Web-based, so one thing we don’t like is the inability to manage the app’s font size on different screens.

Brizzly: Simplify your updating

10Brizzly simplifies your social media browsing and updating experience while taking some of the work out of keeping up to date with trends and followers. It lets you update on Twitter and Facebook. Its Brizzly Guide helps explain trending topics on Twitter. Brizzly is free.