Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

If you’re trying to promote a brand, or just trying to reserve your preferred username on any of the social media sites, click over to KnowEm to do all the search work for you. Simply key in your desired username and the site will check dozens of social media websites at a time. Categories include blogging, bookmarking, business, community, design and more. You can sign up for paid service as well and have them set up all the accounts for you.

Track increase in social media followers for your and your competitors’ Facebook and Twitter accounts with Wildfire’s Social Media Monitor. The company actually sells brand marketing services, but this free app can be useful if you want to track and compare your own versus your competitors’ social media efforts. You can also sign up to receive weekly updates with the most recent fan counts and growth over the past 7 days for several companies at a time.

Facebook is making you believe that controlling your privacy settings is simple, but it can be quite complicated. MakeUseOf has put together a very useful guide on how to button up your page, so the settings are actually working in a way that you had intended them to work.

The guide has 52 pages, and it makes clear, that even if you do everything in your power to control your information on Facebook, it’s simply not possible: for example, someone else can post and tag images with you in them and in the process tell others about your whereabouts.

Excerpt from the guide: If you want to upload contacts, “Facebook doesn’t make you enter your password. It will find contacts from whichever account you’re logged into, regardless of which email address you enter in to Facebook. Sneaky, huh?”

For an easy way to share an image anonymously on the web, try Alan Schaaf’s imgur.com. Images are non-searchable to remain anonymous, but you can share your images through a unique URL if you like. Popular images with thousands of views will get featured in a gallery, while images that get very few or no views will automatically be deleted. Anyone can upload as many images as they like.

Find out what percentage of traffic on Twitter contains a particular hashtag on hashtag.org. You get a graph for the past week which includes daily and hourly numbers. Clicking on the graph will get you 30 day data and if you sign in (free registration) you will also be able to view 90 day and 180 day data which is served by trendistic.com.

Search millions of conversations from social networks, blogs and other social media channels with BackType.com. You’ll also see what’s currently popular and being talked about on the web. This is not the only search engine for social media websites, but one more useful tool when it comes to tracking trends and brands.

Create your own social news website with the free service at SlinkSet.com. Add feeds from your favorite blogs (or your own website) and allow people to add their own items as well. You get a custom URL and within your settings you can decide to make the site public or private, who gets to post and have admin privileges and more. You can also ustomize layout and colors to your liking, add a logo and off you go!

Track your website’s keywords throughout the social media world with SamePoint. It pulls up results from user generated content such as blogs, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Wikipedia, Simpy, Digg, Delicious, YouTube, Facebook and other sites. Use this site to see what people are publishing in real-time and what’s trending. What makes this different from simply going to the usual search engines for results, is that these results are in real time. Even though the major search engines are also adding real time results, their main results still come from data bases. SamePoints’ results are not just useful for marketers, but also for finding new sites for back links and to track what people are saying about your brand.

Submit the lamest, stupidest, funniest or weirdest posts you come across on Facebook to Lamebook. Nervous about your own posts showing up? Don’t worry, images are blurred and links are not clickable Lameness is rated by the lamemeter up to 5 thumbs down.

It’s hard to keep up with all your social media accounts every day. Make it easier on yourself and sign up with Ping.fm to simultaneously update all your accounts. Ping.fm supports Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Myspace, LinkedIn, Bebo and dozens more.