If you plan to increase your use of social media in the new year here are 5 tools that can help you be more effective

1. Feeds – The web isn’t about pages any more. It’s about streams, feeds and syndication.  RSS feeds are the blood vessels of the social web.  It’s how you read news updates from friends on Facebook and Twitter.  And since Google is now indexing real time content such as status updates and displaying them right at the top of a search results  page, it’s vital for PR people to understand feeds and search.  Feeds make it possible for your content to join the content stream on the social web.
2. Monitoring conversations:  It is essential to have a good tool that can help you keep track of what is being said online.  You can do this manually with RSS technology. Set up a custom page at MyAllTop.com or use the latest premium version of NetVibes.com.  Take a look at a sample dashboard here.  And there are several good monitoring tools: Radian6, Filtrbox, Trackur, SM2 and eCairn.
3. Measuring your progress:  You can use the  tools above to keep track of some of the stats you need to keep an eye on, but you also need to learn how to read your web analytics.  Google Analytics is free and it is an excellent system.   You need to know how many unique visitors you get, what days are best to post content, what content people read most, what sites refer traffic to you, etc.  Google Trends and Google Insights for Search can also provide valuable data.
4. A branded, interactive  video player that gives you analytics. Online video is growing at a rapid pace.  Networks, cable companies, marketers and technology firms are getting quite serious about online-video distribution.  A recent study shows that small businesses’ interest in online video has increased by 75% over the last year. (Marketing Profs)  eMarketer predicts that online video will jump by 40% in 2010.  Aand while it is important to have your video content on YouTube – now the 2nd largest search engine after Google – thnk about the value of having your conten on your website in a branded payer that offers the ability to add information, trackable links, buttons to a shopping cart or EBay and back-end analytics, so you can see how many people watch the video, how long do they watch, where do most people leave.  Check out Veeple. And read Greg Jarboe’s book Video Marketing an Hour a Day
5. A Social Media Newsroom.  Once you have content flowing in the social stream, create a space on your website where it can all be easily found and searched. Bloggers and journalists are under immense pressure today.  They don’t have the time to figure out where your content is.   They might run acorss one piece of content in a search or see it on Twitter. But if they want to find out nore they will visit your website.  Make it easy for them to find everything you have and dead simple for them to take it and use it. Our recent survey shows that about 65% of companies and agencies have some form of newsroom online.  Now is the time to upgrade to a social media newsroom.  Offer your content in social media format – give them multi- media elements with the embed codes right there.  Offer a custom search function that searches your social content.  Give links to all your other social profiles and pages.  Let them save and share your content with just a click.

There are many other tools and platforms out there, but these are the 5 social media tools I recommend to get you off to a great start in 2010.