BudURL: Shrink it, Spread it, Watch it Grow

BudURL is battling in a tough market. There are a whole host of url-shortening sites and companies all offering to do the same job. However, what makes BudURL stand out is the quick and easy creating and tracking of url's and the statistics you can see on your own url dashboard.

You can sign up for a free account which lets you create and track up to 250 url's which should be more than enough to convince you that this is a great service. With the ability of analysing your traffic, tracking referrals, and adding notes and tags to any link - you'll wonder how you coped without it!

Econsultancy's Tips on Social Media

The brains over at Econsultancy have just posted an awesome blog with a round up of over 300 tips on how to (and how not to) use social media. It's full of great advice for casual users, small to medium sized enterprises and twitter big hitters.

It's definitely worth a look at for anyone working or dabbling in social media and those who still aren't quite sure about its worth for personal, commercial, and brand gains.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an Adobe Air desktop application for managing your Twitter profile. It makes the endless stream of tweets and re-tweets that little more comprehensible, enjoyable, and informative; simply put, it quiets the noise.

Via the one personal browser you can view just about anything you can think of to do with Twitter (and even Facebook); All Friends updates, @Replies, DM's, you can search, shorten url's and more.

As the brains behind TweetDeck say, "We like to think of it as air traffic control for Twitter."

It's a great way of monitoring your brand, organisation, or campaign. You can actively engage those discussing topics relevant to you and exchange ideas and thoughts affecting you and your followers effortlessly.

Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader was built to help people evaluate and improve their Twitter presence. It's a very user friendly tool from the guys at HubSpot and allows you to track your key stats including Rank, Followers, Following and Updates. As well as this, it gives you a grade out of 100 for your Twitter profile which attempts to quantify and measure its power, reach and authority.

(See how Twitter Rankings are calculated)

Nice extra touches are a Tweet Cloud, a trending graph for user history, and a handy tips and suggestions feature which will highlight any glaring omissions in your page.