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.

[post code: CFMEQEAHE5TG]