By Daniel Casciato

As we head into tax season and closing the books on 2010, we hope that if you haven’t taken the time to see how powerful social media can be in helping to increase your organization’s awareness, and ultimately its bottom line, that you will take the time to finally register that Twitter account, friend some people on Facebook, or spruce up your LinkedIn profile. For those of you have started to explore some of these social media channels, there are some pretty nifty applications out there to help you take your social media to a whole new level.

Formulists (http://formulists.com)

This application, launched in the fall, provides algorithms for creating automatically-updated Twitter lists that will self-populate daily. What this means is that by using Formulists, you can build a list of people who has similar tastes to you; the most-followed users among your followers; those people your followers engage with the most; as well as people who are similar to users you interact with frequently. It’s much more useful than Twitter Lists. You can also use it to track those people who unfollowed you.

BlogPulse (www.blogpulse.com)

BlogPulse is the Google for blogs. It’s a search engine that analyzes and reports what’s happening on the blogosphere. In addition to being a search engine, it can also:

• Track blog activity on key issues and news stories
• Display trends: what are people talking about; you can also track your own trends
• Identify the top-ranked blogs and analyze their blog presence and influence in the blogosphere
• Discover who is mentioning your service or business on their blogs

Rapportive (http://rapportive.com)

We liked Rapportive after playing around with it. This application can pull in social media data from your contacts folder. Instead of displaying a sender’s email address, it can also pull up their LinkedIn profile, Twitter updates, Skype account and other social media data. As a result, you can easily follow those contacts on social media accounts. At a glance, you’ll know who’s on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.  It’s a great way to grow your social media network.

About.me (https//about.me)

If you’re like me, you have several profiles on different social media channels. About.me allows you to create one profile for yourself, and then lets you link visitors to your different social media accounts. So it’s like an autobiographical web page, but it’s free. No worries about paying for a hosting account. Just register with an email address and create a one page profile. It’s simple and easy to use.

Letter.ly (http://letter.ly)

While social media channels are great, we still believe in the power of a good old-fashioned email newsletter. If you have good content, you’ll get readers. If you have great content, many of them will be willing to pay if the price is right. With Letter.ly, you can create simple paid subscription-based newsletters for your audience. Subscribers just have to sign up and pay with a credit card (through Amazon Payments) to become a subscriber. You can decide on the format of the newsletter as well as the frequency and time of delivery.

Have you tried these applications? What else should be on this list? Let us know! Email me at writer@danielcasciato.com.

As a full-time freelance writer, Daniel Casciato helps clients write clear, concise,  and effective content for social media channels, blogs, brochures, newsletters, websites, and other marketing collateral. For more information, visit www.danielcasciato.com, follow him on Twitter, or friend him on Facebook.