I spend a lot of time in LinkedIn groups and have learned a bit about maximizing their potential as conversation-starters. When you contribute something interesting to the group, people will want to find out more about you. The Sales Best Practices group on LinkedIn has a different membership than the Construction Professionals group. You have 15 minutes to edit anything you post in a group, so check your work to make sure your description isn’t a carbon copy of the item to which you link. Polls are a basic tool you can use to solicit feedback. MORE >>

It isn’t that we need a tool that does everything. Its that we need a tool that does what it does really well. As a blogger, there are numerous tools at your disposal to track how your content is doing. But if you use blogging as a tool, whether for personal branding or corporate exposure, you’ll quickly see that these two tools don’t tell the whole story. deceptively simple yet dynamic tool for bloggers which measures what it calls “Engagement Events&# such as a comment, a bookmarked link, or a tweet about a particular post. MORE >>

This week TweetLevel launched a new version of its influence measurement tool that adds context to the influencer scoring in two important ways:  topic and influencer types. The topic search tool allows marketers to identify influencers that are relevant to the conversations they care about. Those two features alone make the new TweetLevel the most powerful influence measurement tool of any that are available for free. And the tool is extremely transparent and descriptive of the formula it uses to calculate that personal influence score.) engagement, and trust. MORE >>

The SeoQuake team, the group behind the SEMRush tools for SEO and keyword research, recently released a new tool to help SEM consultants and agencies find local clients. For SEM agencies and consultants, the SEMRush Geo tool is a prospecting goldmine. Used properly, the tool can help agencies generate new business and advertisers improve the effectiveness of their AdWords campaigns. FTC Disclosure: SEMRush provided access to their tools to assist in conducting this evaluation but did not provide any direct compensation for writing this post. MORE >>

What are the best third-party tools for advanced Facebook analytics? With that in mind here are some Facebook analytics tools to experiment with: PageLever. PageLever may be the most frequently suggested third-party tool, having positioned itself as Facebook Insights on steroids. While SEOMoz Pro is primarily a suite of SEO tools, they recently added a Social Analytics section that provides a range of data on Facebook pages and activity. So that’s a good group to get you started. Had positive or negative experiences with any of these tools? Buddy Media. MORE >>