Buzz Stream – A powerful tool for monitoring social media mentions and building relationships with influencers.  From $50/month you can track a number of keywords and analyse the sites (and authors) engaging in conversations about them. The tool combines social media monitoring with influence analysis (MozRank etc.) and blogger outreach tools that can extract the blogger’s email address and LinkedIn URL.

Influence Finder – Matt Roberts from LinkDex, the VC-funded UK-based start-up that runs Influence Finder, attended the Meetup and gave an impressive description of this new SEO tool (backed up by Murray Newlands, who uses it). Apparently it excels at helping you identify high quality link-building prospects by cutting out irrelevant, valueless blogs and sites. It also offers powerful segmentation features, enabling you to identify blogs that are open to linking to your site (those that allow guest posts, for example). Sounds like a great tool.

Xenu’s Link Sleuth – Download Link Sleuth and run it on your site to check your internal links and identify pages that need more or better targeted internal links. Definitely a worthwhile thing to do once in a while and apparently it’s excellent at it.

Market Samurai – Once you get past the irritating sales video, this sounds like a useful tool for identifying target markets, finding suitable keywords, topics for blog posts you should write etc. Sounds like a good all-rounder. It currently costs $149.00.

Link Diagnosis – This site enables you to analyse who’s linking to your competitors sites, what types of links they are (such as no-follow) and what anchor text they are using. On the basis that sites linking to your competitors might want to link to you, Link Diagnosis could be a powerful weapon in your SEO armoury.

OpenSiteExplorer – Essentially a copy of Yahoo’s Site Explorer tool which identifies back-links to your site. It was apparently created by SEO giant SEOMoz following fears that, with Bing taking over Yahoo’s search capabilities, Site Explorer and other Yahoo API-based tools will be discontinued.

If you’re interested in Inbound Marketing, you should come to the London Inbound Marketing Meetup (monthly) or join the Inbound Marketing Forum on LinkedIn.

While the UI could be improved, this isn’t one of those crappy, two-a-penny social media search tools that have sprung up recently. It’s a proper search tool that not only enables you to search for Twitter users by name and keyword (mentioned in their Twitter Profile) – it also lets you drill down and search within a Twitter users’ Followers or Friends. This isn’t at all apparent from the site, or it’s basic Help page, but with a bit of playing, you’ll figure it out.

By searching first for a user (e.g. oursocialtimes), then using some of the site’s search syntax terms – e.g. only:followers – you can get to some really interesting results. For example, the search term:  “social media” only:followers  shows you how many of your followers have mentioned the term “social media” in their Profile. You can then filter the results according to how many Followers they have, thus producing a list of the most “influential” Followers you have on the subject of social media. These people are ripe to have relationships cultivated with them in order to maximise the viral spread of your “social media”-related Tweets.

You can also use Tweepsearch for location searches – e.g. to find all your Followers who live in your town (Meetup anyone?) – and to get a list of your mutual connections, to see who’s not Following you, or who you need to Follow. It’s uses for adding to your Friends and encouraging more Followers are varied and valuable. In short, it’s all you need to find out who’s who on Twitter.

I’ve tried a few of these services, including Twinfluence and TwitterCounter, but this is the best yet. It’s also quicker and cheaper than most social media monitoring services. Give it a try and drop me a comment with your thoughts.

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1) The fascinating list of the top 10 most re-Tweetable words indicates to me that the call to action “please re-Tweet” does actually work (who’d have thought it). It also suggests that links to “blog posts” as well as things that are “free” and “social” tend to get passed on – which all makes a lot of sense. Requests for “help” also encourage a response, which you would probably expect. All in all, this looks to be a useful set of signposting words.

• You
• Twitter
• Please
• Re-Tweet
• Post
• Blog
• Social
• Free
• Media
• Help

2) Conversely, the list of top 10 least re-Tweetable words is a mixture of throwaway comments (”lol”, “haha”), a couple of actions (”going”, “watching”) and the fundamentals of everyday life (”Home”, “Work”, “Night”, “Bed”). To many, these words are the primary constituents of the millions of tedious Tweets that clog up the Internet. To others they may indicate the more social side of Twitter, where interaction is as valuable as information exchange. You decide!

• Game
• Going
• Haha
• lol
• But
• Watching
• Work
• Home
• Night
• Bed

3) When we get into the detail, I found it interesting that re-Tweets use both longer words, a greater variety of words and more punctuation than Tweets. Again, this would indicate that more erudite, interesting Tweets are being passed on and that – since there are multiple clauses  within the 140 characters – more information is being conveyed in a highly succinct manner.

4) Another fascinating fact (though also an obvious one when you think about it) is that re-Tweets are more conceptual and less emotional than Tweets. This matches in with the general point above that “me journalism” doesn’t carry, whereas facts and figures invite further communication.

5) As if to hammer this point home, we discover that re-Tweets have only 50% the number of self-references as Tweets. This stands to reason. It’s much harder to re-Tweet a sentence that refers to “me” or “I”, unless your followers also know that person well, which often isn’t the case.

6) In terms of timing, the number of Tweets that are re-tweeted increases from a low of 2% at 9am to a high of 6% at 5pm. That surprised me because I figured most people did much of their Tweeting first thing in the morning at work – but perhaps I’m thinking of the wrong demographic. Twitter users are getting younger – so perhaps this late activity is due to school kids hanging out after class. I’d welcome any insights into this one – comments please!

7) The final point I extracted from the presentation is that the likelihood of a tweet being re-Tweeted increases dramatically each time it  is re-Tweeted. It makes sense that high quality,viral content will continue to be shared but, as Dan Zarella points out, this could also be partly down to the “RT” text in the message giving an obvious call to action. It might be worth experimenting to see if, by adding those two letters to your Tweet, it’s gets passed on more – but far be it from me to suggest gaming the system :)