Spinning off this recent article that lists the Top Eight Social Media Campaign Management Tools I thought I’d add two more that I like and make it an even 10 tools that can really help social media marketers better engage their audiences and track results. There is a always a great deal of movement in the industry as new services launch and existing ones change hands or get acquired. My hope is that this list will still be accurate at least 17 seconds after I publish it.

Foursquare, a location-based micro-blogging service that launched in 2009 seems to be on the verge of relevance. In preparation for their marketing push at SXSW they announced that they have added 500,000 new members bringing their total to somewhere in the 1 million area. Additionally, they are launching a free analytics service for business owners so that could create interesting marketing opportunities for businesses that are based on foot traffic. I’m rooting for them because this could become a very interesting marketing medium.

The concept of marketing to people based on where they are at any given time took a big leap forward as Facebook and Twitter recently announced the introduction of geolocation features to accompany user posting activity on their services. Combining their efforts with those of the already established players in the space such as Yelp, Foursquare, Latitude, and Gowalla, it seems that 2010 will be a year of great experimentation for this feature. Time will tell whether marketers and application developers can make this feature useful enough to consumers that they will want to enable it. However, it seems likely that we will soon see software platforms that allows us to monitor social media for people who are nearing our location and message to them thereby combining real-time search with real-time marketing.

I have often written that your social media marketing has to focus on the needs of the audience first. However this recent article by Clay MacDaniel cites research by Razorfish and She’sConnected.com are indicating that a primary reason for consumers to fan your company or brand is to receive promotions and discounts. Let’s take a look at some ways that you can find a balance between social media marketing that attracts the attentions of your audience and social media marketing that pushes sales messages to them.

For a short while this past week, there was an accidentally revealed document floating around the web that shows some potential upcoming developments in facebook marketing…and they are definitely ideas that will make business page owners very happy. The document itself is no longer anywhere where I can link to it but there is this useful article about it on the Inside Facebook site. Here’s the high points:

“What are other people doing and what’s really working?” We got a sneak peak at some of the valuable information in The 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report from MarketingSherpa. The accompanying chart shows us which social media marketing tactics are most often used and considered most effective by our marketing peers.

OK I know that acronym thinking is trite and that many of us have already heard about the POST methodology until we want to PLOTZ. But, I have been speaking with many companies lately about their social media plans and I have to admit that this old methodology keeps coming up as the one of the best places to start. Here’s a quick review of how it works and why it works so well for social media plans in my opinion.

I enjoy the research published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project because it is not motivated by any particular agenda. So it came as a surprise to me to learn that they are reporting that 19% of those recently surveyed use Twitter or “some other form of status update service (not quite sure what they mean by this). This is up from 11% only 1 year ago. I know that Twitter is fast-growing but since Pew generally reports more conservative numbers than other surveys this is impressive. Additionall, the same survey is showing that the median age for Facebook users is rising: Up to 33 from 26 only 1 year ago–big jump!

The EVoter Institute has recently released a report entitles “Persuading and Motivating Voters: What Will It Take in 2010?” that drives home the importance of the Internet and the changing dynamics in the ways we all consumer news and information. The study is well worth the read no matter what industry you are in primarily because it illustrates the increasing ways that social media content is being used by consumers.

Much is discussed about how to track the ROI of social media marketing efforts and it seems that in the space of time it will take me to type this that 3 new Twitter software tools will launch that claim to do this. However, most of us have some tools are our disposal right now that do a darn good job of getting us very detailed information if we are prepared to take an extra step or two. By combining tracking urls like those generated by Google analytics with a URL shortener like bit.ly you can not only get information on the clikc activity of your inbound links from social media posts but you can filter your analytics to create reports on what the traffic is doing once they enter your site.