A bevy of options covering a range of services—from monitoring social mentions to indexing real-time photos—to help you excel at the social media game.

 

Here are the 10 most-useful new social media tools of 2012 (so far): 

1. Mention (http://goo.gl/GzpyQ) monitor social mentions with ease

Social media listening/monitoring tools seem to be unnecessarily complicated, but Mention is the exact opposite. It includes “anti-noise” technology to remove duplicate mentions from bots.

2. RebelMouse (http://goo.gl/dA9HI) aggregate your social feeds in one place

This can be described as your “social front page,” pulling together all the stuff you're sharing in a well-organized and easy-on-the-eyes layout. As far as personal hubs go, this is one of the best.

3. SharedCount (http://goo.gl/u09ZJ) track your tweets, “likes,” +1's, pins, and more

Often when you’re tracking online campaigns you'll be asked to provide a summary of how many times a link has been shared. If you own or have access to the back end of a site, this is simple; however, if you want to track a link that you don't own, it isn't as easy. Say hello to the solution, SharedCount.com.

4. SocialNumbers (http://goo.gl/WgC77) access Facebook page stats by country in real time

SocialBakers has established itself as one of the best places to access page and profile stats, but SocialNumbers is worth having in your toolkit, too. The most useful element of SocialNumbers is the “People Talking About” breakdowns, which give you a good idea of who is generating buzz versus community size.

5. TreeVisualisation (http://goo.gl/IX1QS) a data visualization tool

Sorting through data to glean meaning can be a painful process. This tool eases the pain by visualizing it in a variety of formats.

 

 

6. Fruji (http://goo.gl/1lVxW) professional Twitter analytics

As with most social media tools, this platform analyzes your Twitter followers and compiles a report for you by adopting the freemium/premium model. You can test its capabilities on your personal account and upgrade to the business package for deeper analytics. 

7. Wavii (http://goo.gl/dUk6T) follow news that interests you

This is usually the first page I open when I turn on my laptop in the morning. Wavii crawls the Web to find news about specific topics and then features them in a stream. It's like Twitter, but without the personal interaction. If you have to follow particular brands and organizations as part of your day job, you'll find this incredibly handy.

8. WebsitesLike (http://goo.gl/47ONY) find similar websites by URL and keyword(s)

There are a number of sites like WebsitesLike, which finds related websites that are similar to those you already enjoy. However, few of these like-minded services deliver results based on keywords, as WebsitesLike does. This also displays results in an easy-to-digest manner.

9. SkyLines (http://goo.gl/jG0Uw) search for photos in real-time

The image-powered Web continues to influence what brands are doing online, and real-time image publishing is at the heart of that trend. This is what SkyLines does, and it outperforms its competitors. The Netherlands-based startup indexes more than 5 million photos a day sent through various social media platforms. 


10. Nod3x (http://goo.gl/7nIZD) real-time conversation visualization and intervention

This is probably the most exciting tool that has surfaced in 2012. Nod3x tracks social media conversations and enables you to search and monitor them by keyword—but that isn't the special part. What makes this great is the way the data are visualized, clearly demonstrating which users are driving online conversations and who is most instrumental in amplifying that content.