Last June I reviewed six distinct twitter tools for use in small business and since then I’ve had a lot of time to work out kinks in the process of leveraging social media tools for business. 

Today, I’m going to share with you two very powerful (and free) tools to use for not just Twitter, but all of your major social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and more!

I’ll keep this very short and sweet, so stay with me a bit :)

The first social media tool is Ping.fm

pingfm logoPing.fm is a social media distribution application.  In simple words, you can type your message once and it goes to every social media site you have associated with your Ping.fm account.  The beauty here is you can associate nearly every major social network with this application, allowing you to spend more time focusing on the message you’re sending out rather than worrying about getting that message into all of your social networks.

The second social media tool is HootSuite

HootSuiteHootSuite, like Ping.fm allows you to associate your social networking profiles, but here’s the part that makes HootSuite shine over all others: not only can you associate multiple Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and even Ping.fm accounts, but you can schedule your status updates for weeks or even months out in advance and the built in reporting is simply amazing.

The conclusion of the matter is this: social media can be very powerful, but it can also be extremely time consuming.  By leveraging these two social media tools, you can get more content out to more places in far less time!

I plan on producing some tutorials to help you get started in the coming months, so stay tuned!   Reply with your questions or comments about Ping.fm and HootSuite.