From Successful Business News:

8 Tools Your Business Must Use to Leverage Social Media

By now, you already know that social media is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to market and advertise your business. There are a number of tools on the market that are designed to help you take advantage of social media in a way that makes you more effective and saves time.

The goal of these tools is to help you integrate social media into your daily business practices, and while you may be familiar with some tools like Google Docs and Radian 6, these are eight tools your business may not be aware of.

Hootsuite is a little like a digital dashboard for all of your social media needs. Designed to work with major platforms including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FourSquare, the tool allows you to quickly manage updates to as many platforms as you need. Already a favorite among big business and even political campaigns, Hootsuite makes it easy to manage a number of microblogging sites and social media tools from a single, easy to use dashboard.

Dropbox is a super smart tool for businesses that lets you store files on the Dropbox site and then access them from anywhere. It’s a little like a fileserver that doesn’t require an actual server. The tool also offers a version for iPhone, making it easy for you and your employees to share information quickly. You can then use this information to update your social media sites in real time from anywhere you take your cell phone.

Screenr is a tool that allows you to quickly and easily create screencasts, or videos that capture your computer screen and an audio recording to show users how to work a new feature on your site. This tool makes it fast and easy to create videos that can explain to users in a few minutes what would otherwise take hours to explain, and you can add your screencasts to your social media pages, creating engaging content that keeps visitors interested.

Monitter is an online reputation management tool that instantly shows you what people are saying about your business online. The tool allows you to search for any mention of your business online with just a quick entry. You can also look for your own name, product names, or anything else you want to stay up to date on. This tool can help you reach out to potential users and manage any mentions that you get online.

Mail Chimp is a great way to test the waters for email marketing. The tool provides a way for you to manage email lists, analyze and track emails, and create custom HTML email templates. The tool is free for up to 500 users and will send out as many as 3000 emails per month. If you want to try email marketing, this is an ideal way to try without spending a fortune.

iGoogle is ideal for anyone who regularly uses tools such as gmail or the Google search engine. Create an iGoogle page, set it as your home page, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds which let you know whenever someone blogs or tweets about you, products or services you offer, or your industry in general.

Technorati is a tool that lets you search across different blogs to find out what people are writing about. Leverage the tool to find out what people are saying about your product or service, problems that people see with your competitor, or issues within your target market. It’s a way of using social media to collect information about what your customers need.

Hubspot is a tool that lets businesses take advantage of a suite of social media tools including auto-publishing, social media monitoring, and social media analysis. The tool offers business people a way to handle a number of the trickier parts of handling their social media presence from a single easy to use application.

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