1. Audience Retention Report – YouTube

Simply counting views is not enough. How long are your videos being watched for? Are people just “switching off” after a few seconds, and moving onto another video entirely? Content matters, and effective marketing campaigns make their content interesting. Therefore, it may be better to have 1, 000 people watch your YouTube video in its entirety rather than have 10,000 people watch your video for a few seconds.

2. Wildfire – Google

The Marketing Suite is expensive but worth it if you’re a big business with big marketing budgets and a big marketing department to match; as it provides a comprehensive set of marketing tools for customer analytics, advertising, messaging, monitoring, promotions and much, much more. This is the ultimate marketing optimisation tool.

There is also the cheaper ‘Promotion Builder’ option, which can be used for coupons, contests and quizzes, which in turn captures data for Facebook adverts. The keyword for how both options work is ‘geotargeting’ – a method used to determine the geographical location of a website visitor and targeting content based on their location.

3. Social Crawlytics

Smart marketing at its finest. This software is essentially a spying tool used to identify your competitor’s most shared content, and who shared it. Adobe, eBay and Microsoft are some of its many users. You can sign up with Twitter and use this amazing tool for free.

4. EdgeRank Checker

This tool is used to increase your exposure and fan engagement on Facebook. Though it’s only for use with Facebook, it’s still a great, simple-to-use piece of marketing technology with easy-to-read metrics.

5. SocialToaster

This is the social marketing tool of choice for many American Sports teams, including the Detroit Pistons and the Toronto Argonauts. This is more of an engagement tool, using games to reward fans with prizes, discounts and insider information should they garner enough points by increasing your website’s traffic.

6. Crowdbooster

Basically, this nifty little tool gives you the best time of day to tweet your messages in order to reach the largest audience possible. Crowdbooster can also analyse your Facebook metrics for top posts, biggest fans and your brand’s ‘Facebook Reach’. This is similar to TweetReach.

7. PostAcumen

If you’re looking for a complimentary tool for SocialCrawlytics, this is it. Created by the same people who made EdgeRank, PostAcumen compares your Facebook metrics with your competitors’.

8. Pinterest

Pinterest is a photo-sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based collections. “Pins” are generally categorised by theme, so one can easily search and link to photos and videos of a similar nature. Pins can reflect one’s interests and hobbies, or be used to build image collections from events. Pinterest pages can also be used as an effective virtual store front.

9. Quozio

You’ve signed up to Pinterest, but are now stumped for an image for your pin. Quozio comes to the rescue for when you’re stuck for ideas. All you have to do is take a portion of text (say, a memorable quote), and Quozio will create an image for you, based on that text. Great for generating images from texts, or linking a Pinterest page to an interesting piece of content.

10. Cyfe

An all-in-one metrics dashboard that helps you monitor and analyse data across your online services (Google Analytics, MailChimp, Adsense, Facebook, WordPress etc.), and it easily rivals Geckoboard. Cyfe has the added advantage of being free. A simple, easy-on-the-eye design that’s easily accessible and shareable: smart marketing at its finest.

11. SocLock

This is a social content locker that rewards readers with “secret” content on their website should they Like, Tweet or Plus One your website. SocLock is an interesting and somewhat underused open source tool that can give real insight to customer behaviour.

12. Edit Flow

This is a plugin for WordPress, and quite a good one at that. With EditFlow, you can create customised statuses, a snapshot of your content with the calendar feature, and helps keep your writers organised by department or function. Effectively, this is a tool to help establish and improve upon communications between an editorial team. An excellent tool for media organisations.