Social media marketing is a crucial part of any internet marketing campaign. The objective of each program varies from business to business, but usually involves the building of brand awareness, increasing visibility and sells a service or product. This is achieved through contribution in different networks like My Space, You Tube and Face Book, social web applications like Twitter, Reddit, Digg, online bookmarking sites like Delicious. Participating in any of these social networks can be extremely rewarding but it requires significant amount of time and effort. Here are some of the tools you can use to make this job a bit easier and not so time consuming.

Social Media for Firefox Extension

Submitting pages to social media websites is a time consuming job. The social media for Firefox extension helps you to save time by allowing you to check if it has been submitted to major social networks, how many votes it has received and all this just with click of the button. And if your story isn’t published you can do that just as

Instant Messenger and Twitter

You have created the great content you need and submitted it to the social networks. Why stop there? This is SOCIAL media, so why not go one step further and share your content with friends and colleagues via IM and Twitter. But don’t spam them all the time for all content. No one likes a spammer and if you are not careful you may loose readers.Digsby is a great application which combines IM, Email and Social networks in one. And the best thing - it's FREE!

StumbleUpon Toolbar

The ease of use and toolbar is what separates StumbleUpon from others. With the help of Stumble Upon toolbar you may easily provide thumbs up or down to any page that you are viewing, plus there are many other features like sharing files or links with friends and stumble the favorites of other clients. Once you have installed this toolbar, you will be ready to create a strong profile while spending no additional time of your normal internet usage.

Social Sniffer

You have a website or a blog. You spent hours on Digg, Delicions and Twitter. You have created a webpage about your company on Facebook. But how do you know how well are you doing? Social Sniffer is a tool which helps track your progress on some of the most known Social Networks out there. Track your twitter followers, Facebook fans , number of Diggs and more with just a click of a button.

Shareaholic Browser Extension

Shareholic is a type of extension that is created to allow easy interaction. It provides you the opportunity to easily vote or submit pages that you are viewing, it contains a number of different media websites and you may even email pages to friends.

Google Trends

Lets face it, writing great content is not always easy and great stories aren’t born everyday. Google trends along with Twitter are considered to be one of the best tools for tracking hot and latest news. You may see graphs and charts and you can also look behind at the trends for a specific day in the past.

These are just some of the social media tools you could use to ease your marketing efforts. There are many many more. If there are tools you would like to include in the list please use the comments and I will make sure to add them.