Here is a list of top social media tools with some information to help you decide if you need to use them.

Want to see how you rank in terms of authority on a certain topic?  Check out PeerIndex. Free.

If you are looking for a way to keep your social search alerts in one place and run reports on them then Scout Labs is a great way of doing that – you can even run share of voice reports for competitive analysis.  Not for free though…..

Twittersheep creates a tag cloud from the status updates of your follows – simply enter your Twitter username (or someone elses) and see what the top topics are that their followers tweet.

TwitterAnalyzer is bursting with information on Twitter accounts (yours or anybody elses) you can while away a good few hours checking out the job function of your followers, how often they log in, where in the world they are, what interface they use, gender, eye colour (ok, not the last one but you get the drift).  I just wish they’d invest some time in the look and feel, black is soooo last season.

Looks like TwitterAnalyzer is out of business – that or their platform is highly unstable nowadays – ED

Twittercounter allows you to analyse followers and tweeting activity.  Pro account costs but not much.  Free account allows you to get a lot of useful stats simply by entering the Twitter Username.

Radian6 is a high-end solution for large enterprise to monitor, manage, respond and analyze social media activity around brands.  Available via Webtrends as well so you can integrate if you already use Webtrends as your analytics package.  Not cheap, but it shows.

[Update] Pricing starts from £85 per user license and £375 per 10,000 mentions (they define mentions as any item that appears in your search – the wealth of criteria that you can refine those searches by is pretty comprehensive so you are unlikely to get too much ‘noise’ that you end up paying for.)

There are in beta testing of a new product that is desktop based – think Hootsuite+ – pricing TBA

Hootsuite claims to be the ultimate toolbox for Twitter users and they might be right.  Accessed via browser (handy if you hotdesk or work from multiple locations) Hootsuite allows you to create ‘columns’ based on search terms, Twitter Lists and many more.  Hootlet is available to add to your browser so you can quickly tweet what you’re viewing.  Multiple profile support, team management and WordPress integration are just some of the reasons users love Hootsuite – but you have to pay for the really useful team management stuff.

SocialOomph used to be Tweetlater (when it was it actually seemed to work…) you are supposed to be able to create automatic messages to be sent to your new followers (never worked for me) and schedule tweets, track keywords on twitter (that bit works).  Manage Facebook and blogs and much more.  They charge $30 a month for the professional version – I hope it works better than the free version…

Ping.fm updates all your networks at the same time.  If you want to do this then ping.fm is your tool.  Simple, Ronseal type tool.  Add your profiles, link them to ping.fm and “say it”.

Bit.ly is one of the best URL shrinkers out there.  Why? Well it has a great analytics suite so you can see how often you links are clicked, most popular links etc.  If you use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck you’ll probably be using a different shrinker – there are many out there – so it might not be worth using.  You can use the shrinker as a link tracker for your website and external links though, you can’t do that as easily within a twitter management environment.

Tweeteffect shows you which tweets you send that lose or gain you followers.  Very simple to use and easy to follow the stats.  Obviously it isn’t an exact science but it’s interesting none-the-less.

Klout.com has established itself as ‘the standard for influence’.  You can measure your reach (it differentiates between real profiles and bots), the likelihood of your content being acted upon, how much authority/influence do you have etc.  One of the most robust measurement tools for your twitter activity.

Like Klout but not as good! twinfluence measures reach and velocity and how resilient you are in terms of losing followers.  However, it frequently runs out of API calls to twitter and leaves you having to wait 49 minutes before you can run any more profiles…