"A movement is currently surfacing online, a movement towards a single metric that captures an individual’s influence rather than presences online."

Social Mention is a great real-time search engine, with a an edge. As well as functioning as an easy-to-use search engine, this site offers you more, with the option to receive email alerts every time there’s a new piece of content across selected social media channels that contains your keyword. The site also has a widget you can display on a blog or site to show visitors a summary of your social buzz. Their search engine is a great way to get a detailed overview of your presence on social media, split down by content type to see the areas you’re active in or being discussed.

Topsy is a comprehensive search engine and has some advanced features that allows you to scan back through tweets. Allowing you to search by location, keywords and even sentiment on particular tweets. Topsy give you insight into search terms, showing you how many others have retweeted, a preview of the full links contained in tweets and allowing you to filter easily by hour, day, week, month or year. It is certainly one of the most comprehensive Twitter search engines, which doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves !

PeerIndex focus on a movement that is currently surfacing online, a movement towards a single metric that captures an individual’s influence rather than presences online. Peerindex does this through analyzes the flow of information through Twitter and other channels and delivers metrics such as: Authority, Resonance, Audience, Activity and Realness. Overall this a nice tool to help you gauge the effectiveness and influence of you social networking efforts however it still has a way to go before it is seen as a truly reliable indicator of influence but defiantly worth a look.

A easy to use, essential tool for managing a social media account online. Bit.ly is a url shortener that in addition to shortening urls allows you to access detailed analytics and click through rates on your link. This is information that you allot of the time is not accessible when posting links on social channels. It is important to remember that even though you can use bit.ly to create short urls without logging in, that you always create links from your registered account to ensure that clicks are tracked and you can access historical data.

Possibly the most essential item in your social media arsenal is a good dashboard client, TweetDeck a terrific time saver allowing you to manage all your personal social media profiles in one place a best of all its 100% free. TweetDeck connects across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Google Buzz and allows you to update or schedule posts with the same status to all or just a few at one time.

A crisp, clean and user friendly user interface can even makes some networks more fun. With a powerful Google Maps integration into Foursquare, you can visualise your friends’ checkins in real time. You can also view photos and videos from within the program.

As you could probably have guessed, TweetDeck really comes into its own at managing Twitter accounts. It makes the experience highly customizable by organizing feeds, mentions, messages and searches across columns.

All though the user interface is generally easy to use, it can get a little clogged if your streams have a lot of activity, sometimes making it difficult to keep up with updates and engagement.