Absolutely Free (and Cool) Social Media Tools

The best thing about social media is it's free, except for the time spent online trying to figure it all out.

Here are some of the best free tools you should be utilizing to manage your time and efforts in the ever expanding social media realm.

1. Social Oomph: Schedule tweets, track keywords, set auto replies and auto follow/unfollows, send DMs to new followers, vet new followers, view @mentions and retweets, and much more.

2. Hootsuite: Hootsuite is one of my favorite tools. You can manage multiple Twitter profiles, along with  your Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Foursquare accounts, pre-schedule tweets and measure activities.

3. Tweetmeme: Tweetmeme finds the hottest stories for you to retweet. You can also add a tweetmeme app to your blog posts, making it easier for readers to promote your blog.

4. Alltop: Alltop is like an online magazine rack. They collect headlines of the latestest stories from tbe best sites and blogs that cover a topic. I use the site for links to articles that might be interesting for my Twitter followers. I've also discovered some great blog topics from the headlines.

5. Social Mention: Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos and more.

6. BoardTracker: BoardTracker is the leading search engine for message boards and forums and provides innovative search, analysis and social networking technology to bring people closer to the boards

7. Digg: Digg is a social news website that can help you share blog posts and web pages. It is a great tool for promoting your own web pages, blog posts and online articles.

8. Delicious: Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. It is another way to promote your favorite sites.

9. Google Buzz: Google Buzz is a social networking and messaging tool from Google. Users can share links, photos, videos, status messages and comments organized in "conversations" and visible in the user's inbox.

Just remember, you don't have to utilize all of these tools at once. Try one tool a week and see what works best for you. Some of these sites may just be the key to your social media success.

Have anything you want to share? Please do.