ALOQA: is a mobile service that keeps you informed on things that are going on all around you. Not only useful to find events and activities to be a part of, but it can help you find new opportunities for your business in your local area.

Appify: Appify is a website designed to help its users discover new applications. It can help you find local and all other types of applications with the help of its community.

We Places: a very fun tool to use if you are into Foursquare. It visualizes your check-ins and lets you share it all with the world. It can also be a decent tool to do some spying in your local area.

Tupalo: a tool that lets you discover and share your thoughts on your local businesses with others. Of course, you should use this tool to find out what people are saying about your competitors or anything related to your niche.

Fwix: a powerful search engine to find events, reviews, photos, and places in your local area. It shows you “hot places,” and what’s “trending.” A very neat local tool to explore.

Even if you own an online-only business, you should still pay attention to your local area. Opportunities may be closer than you think.

Klout: you are still going to need a social media strategist after using this tool, but Klout can show you how influential you are and things that you may be doing wrong.

Flipboard for iPad: Flipboard is a very fun tool to use for business owners who want to keep up with the latest developments in their worlds right on their iPad.

Tal.ki: adds a dynamic forum to your website, which your visitors can log on to using their social media accounts on Twitter or Facebook.

Rank Speed: combines results from the blogosphere and twitterverse and lets you do a sentiment analysis for results in your niche.

ClickMeter: you can’t have a social media strategy if you do not keep track of the links that you post to your accounts. ClickMeter (which is used to detect click fraud too) is just the tracking tool you’ll need.

Getting the most out of Twitter for your business is more than just posting links and communicating with your prospects. Tracking and analyzing your efforts should be at the top of your agenda too.

You can’t become a Facebook guru in one night. But there are simple steps you can take to take your business to the next level. If you are new to Facebook and have no idea how to get more out of it to take your business to the next level, here are 10 easy-to-implement tactics that should give you ideas:

1. Make a Professional-looking Facebook page: have you seen those Facebook pages that are all over the place. There is nothing wrong with that if it’s your personal Facebook profile that is messy and full of useless content. But your business page should focus on things that matter to your audience. The looks matter too. Your Facebook page could leave a long lasting impression on your prospects, so be careful what you show on your pages. It also never hurts to invest some money to put up a more professional looking Facebook page.
2. Add Interactive Applications: setting up a Facebook page should not be the only step you take to push your business. Don’t ignore some of those apps that can make it all more interactive for your Facebook fans. No silly apps though.
3. Throw Facebook Giveaways: Facebook giveaways can be very effective, if done right. We are not talking about those fake Facebook giveaways. Having exclusive giveaways for your Facebook fans can help spread the word about your business and increase your friends on the site. Don’t forget to read the terms and conditions of Facebook on contests.
4. Optimize Facebook Page for SEO: The text on your Facebook page does matter to search engines. So does the custom URL that you choose for your page. Some FB apps can help you even do more in this regard. It never hurts to get visitors from search engines for free.
5. Measure and track Interactions: this is a no brainer. Why would you want to set up a Facebook page and ignore things that happen on it. Treat it as your own web page. If you go through your website’s statistics on a consistent basis, you should do the same with your Facebook page (using tools such as dlvr.it never hurts).
6. Add a Like Button To Your Website: if you have lots of useful content/pages on your website, you should take time to add Facebook Like Button to those pages. It does help your pages get more traffic and go viral on Facebook.
7. Add a Like Box To Your Web Page: one of the best ways to increase the number of your friends on Facebook is by giving your visitors a simple tool to connect with you and your business. Facebook Like Boxes are a good place to start if you want to use your website’s traffic to enhance your Facebook presence.
8. Promote Business with Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads may not be as popular as Google Adwords, but it could be much cheaper and can give you a good bang for your buck (if you play your cards right). There is no reason not to advertise on Facebook, especially when it can be fairly cheap. Testing never hurts either.
9. Enable Facebook Comments: if you own a blog, you want to take time to integrate Facebook comments into your blog. Your visitors do not want to remember too many things when commenting on blogs. Everybody remembers their Facebook information. Businesses can increase their Facebook traffic by taking advantage of this functionality.
10. Link Other Social Profiles: there is a good chance Facebook is not the only place you are focused on as a small business owner. Twitter, Posterous, and other services have their benefits as well. It never hurts to link all your social media profiles and give your friends ways to follow you on those sites.

There you have it. These tips are not ground-breaking or too complicated, but they can make a big difference. Facebook is still underrated among small business owners. So take advantage your business has fallen too far behind.

There are a few premium tools that are worth paying for, but you don’t have to pay anything to get started with your social tracking process. Here is a mix of 5 free and paid social tracking tools that can help you track your business’ progress in social media:

Dlvr.it: a very handy tool for businesses that want to syndicate their content across the social web. Whether it’s LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter that you want to be involved in, Dlvr.it has you covered. It provides you with useful stats as well.

Su.pr: a syndication service by StumbleUpon that not only keeps track of all the love that your links get, it can also help bring more traffic to your business.

ClickMeter: one of our favorite services. It’s like Google Analytics for your links. No matter where you want to post your links, this service can keep track of them all.

Radian6: a tool that is used by many top companies. Small businesses can get some value out of it, but it is not a cheap service. It can keep track of your online reputation across the social web.

Twitter Analyzer: a handy tool to keep track of your followers on Twitter. It analyzes any Twitter account that you provided it with and shows you some top level stats for each submitted account.

There you have it. 5 handy tools that let you keep track of your business’ progress across the social web. Most of them are free, so there is no reason not to try them.

If you are looking for powerful social media tools to share and discover content online, here are 5 content tools you should try:

Thoora: a very easy way to discover the top content online. It keeps track of tweets, blogs, and everything in between. It also shows you the number of articles and posts about each entry and the frequency of mentions as well.

Cadmus: Cadmus is a real-time service that manages your stream (Twitter, FriendFeed and RSS) by displaying the most relevant content for you. A great tool to keep track of stories about your brand and staying on the top of your content.

dlvr.it: a powerful way to share your content on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. It also enables you to keep track of your social stats, so you can figure out what your audience is most interested in.

Tabsite: Tabsite is a very simple to use but powerful service for Facebook that enables you to add your own website in form of a tab to your personal Facebook profile or business fan page.

Tweetiator: another powerful tool for any business that is taking advantage of Twitter to share stories, generate leads, and track its brand. This tool alerts you when people share links to your content on Twitter and helps you connect with them. 

The above 5 tools are not the only ones you can use to track your business on social networking sites, but they are free and powerful. If you are serious about using the social media for business, the above tools are a must try.

You won’t even have to start from scratch to go about launching your own social networking website. There are many open source and proprietary solutions that enable you to get the job done. In fact, here are 3 top social networking software that make starting a niche social networking service a piece of cake:

Ning: a year ago, I would have called Ning a service that was only useful to beginners. But the service has been improved in many ways, and it is so flexible anyone can use it to build a social portal or a community around a niche. You can not only create a social community on the site, you can also use your own domain (for some additional fee) to take better control of your social network.

Pligg: Pligg is one of the best content management services to start your own “Digg-like” social networking website. All you have to do is partner up with a decent web host, get a decent design on the top of your Pligg software, and have a broad-enough topic for your social networking account. The software is free, and you can customize and change things around without too much trouble.

Elgg: While Pligg is more used for “Digg-type” social networking websites, Elgg can be used to create your own mini Facebook or MySpace. The code is much more easier to work with than Pligg, and your users will have the ability to create their own blogs, groups, and so on.

There are plenty of other content management solutions that you can use to start your own social network. Just keep in mind that you need to have a set of goals and a plan if you want to succeed with your website. Social networks are all over the place these days, but only those that provide a unique value to their users have a chance to succeed.

Going through hundreds of websites to search for your name and reserve your name can be time consuming. Not if you are using some of the social media profile management tools that are available. They not only save you time reserving your brand name across the social media, they make the process painless. If you are looking for such a tool, here are 4 social media username tools you should check out:

NameChk: lets you find out whether your favorite username (which should be your brand name) is taken on those popular social networking websites.

My Friends Call Me: very similar to the above tool. I do love the fact that it classifies the social networks so you know which one applies to your niche. It’s pretty slick too.

KnowEm: it’s one easy to use tool that lets you register your name across top social networking websites and reserve your brand name for the future.

yoName: a bit different from the above tools, yoName lets you search for people’s record on popular sites such as Twitter. You can also search for your brand related keyword phrases.

There you have it. 4 very useful tools to manage your social media usernames more effectively. What’s your favorite tool?

YouTube: YouTube doesn’t need any introduction. Your videos will most likely get the most hits on YouTube, and the search engines will bring even more traffic to your videos if you optimize your videos.

Viddler: Viddler is made for those who are looking to create branded videos. The pro plans can be pricey, but the service is well worth the investment if you are into vlogging. The prices are not that bad if you are getting real results with you videos. Great for web shows too.

Vimeo: Vimeo is one of the best alternatives to YouTube. In fact, many professionals use Vimeo to share their videos with the world. It may not get as much traffic as YouTube, but I found it easier to work with. Many businesses are using Vimeo as a way to give demo of their products or communicate with their customers.

DailyMotion: yet another underrated video sharing website. There are a lot of European videos on the site, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use this service to get more impressions for your videos. You can also partner up with DailyMotion and get rolling with MotionMakers program. In that case, you can expect your videos to be promoted by DailyMotion.

MetaCafe: MetaCafe was one of the first videos sites that started compensating video producers. Video makers who had their content go popular on MetaCafe were somewhat compensated for their work. MetaCafe is community driven, so make sure your videos are high quality and useful or the community will let you have it.

Veoh: Veoh has been around for years. It’s a platform for business professionals and all other types of publishers to get their work in front of Veoh’s community. Once you upload your video, you are going to have the opportunity to use the tools available to promote your videos.

TubeMogul: one of the best ways to keep track of your videos and their performance across popular video sharing websites. All you have to do is make a killer video, upload it to TubeMogul, and let the service upload your videos to top video sharing sites. It definitely saves time.

What’’s your favorite video sharing site for business?

Google Wave is not that different what you have come to see on e-mail and social media sites. It’s just a combination of everything. It facilitates rich communications with your contacts. You can extend what you see on Google Wave through robots, gadgets, and other extensions. Think about it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could receive your tweets on a Wave and be able to respod to invidual tweets right there?  How about using your Wave account to allow multiple people to tweet on the behalf of your company? How about adding gadgets that keep you informed on information that matter to you on a daily basis. That’s all possible using Google Wave.

Here is how Google Wave works. Each Wave is a thread of conversation. You can easily add your contact to your wavelets (with extensions) and get them to communicate with you more effectively. Sharing videos, documents, and everything else in between couldn’t be easier using Google Wave. You can also invite multiple people to your wave, and they all can communicate among each other without you and them having to send messages back and forth. There are plenty of extensions that you can install on Wave. You can play games and do all kinds of fun things with Wave. But if you are planning to use Wave in your small business, here are the extensions you should look for:

• Integration: there are plenty of add ons that let you add third party services to Google Wave. You can easily add Bit.ly, Twitter, and everything else you use on a daily basis (e.g. Tweety).
• Groups: these extensions allow you to communicate better in your group. This comes very handy if you want your small business team to communicate more effectively online (e.g. Groupy).
• Language: if you run a multi-national business or just want to have an easy time translating things, you can do it easily on Google Wave (Rosy Etta).
• Polling: lets say you want to manage your small business team remotely. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could poll them on your ideas right away (Pollster)?
• Search: yet another way to make your experience on Wave richer. For instance, you can add Yelp to Google Wave. Can’t do that on e-mail.

Google Wave is still in its infancy, and that is exactly why you should take time to get yourself familiar with it. The time is now to get an early advantage with this cool tool. The sooner you learn and master it, the better off your business will be for it. Just don’t spend too much time on it as it’s very addictive.

Twitter has not yet rolled out the feature yet, so not everyone can take advantage of the lists. But the lucky ones who can will see a new number next to their number of followers. That number will show the lists that you are included on. Obviously, the more you are listed, there is a good chance that more people find you more useful. So lists are essentially #followfriday on steroids.

If you are a small business owner, hoping to gain some traction on Twitter, lists are godsend for you. They allow you to classify the people you are following under different lists and engage them more effectively. You can create public and private lists of people who may be interesting to your business or those who are talking about your business or niche. You can then decide on the message you want to communicate with each and every list.

Lists will also be very helpful for people who get their research done through the social media. Whether it is finding interesting content to read or researching a specific niche, you can easily do it with lists. Let’s say you want to see what people are talking about as far as laptops are concerned. You can easily create a private list of people who talk about laptops (and provide value in the process). You can then check your list on a daily basis to find out the latest blog posts, news, and developments in that world. You could have done that through Twitter trends and some 3rd party tools. With lists, you can easily get it done.

As you can see, lists are going to be very helpful for startups and small businesses that want to get the most out of Twitter. They are easy to create, free to use, and help you manage information more effectively. There is a lot of information and data to look at on these social media sites, and as a small business owner, you should have better things to do than going through the information for hours. With Twitter lists, you can manage your Twitter information more effectively and get more done in the process.