Today I had the pleasure to attend the SES London talk on social media solutions on a budget. The discussion was lead by Lee Odden, Andrew Girdwood, Paul Madden and Marcus Tober.

The speakers emphasised the fact that each tool has its advantages and disadvantages and that choice should purely be based on your brand’s social media needs. Meaning that solutions are here to help you spread and cultivate high quality content across social networks. However, before applying any of these one has to monitor and truly understand your audience’s social patterns before using automated tools to support your efforts!

Here’s a list of the featured social media tools with a brief description.

Evri

Can be described as a news reader tool. It’s a content discovery semantic search technology tool whilst the differentiation is that it actually provides a “topic-based” approach. Helps the user to create and follow a particular topic generated from a search query. So far it captures content from Facebook and Twitter feeds. Additionally it indexes 2.3 million topics from over 15,000 different web sources.

Trap!t

This tool helps you to find content purely based on your interest and the industry you are operating in. It provides the user with relevant content based on your topic “traps” for easy consumption. Over time it gets “to know you better” and keeps up with your evolving topics of interest. It delivers content from news, blogs, videos and reviews from over 5,000 sources.

Strawberryj.am

This tool focuses purely on your Twitter streams. It examines what links are shared by your target audience, peers and industry. This is very useful as it provides the user with popular links in real time.

Pipes

Aims to help you aggregate and mash-up online content. Your commands can be combined in order to create the required output. It enables you to sort, filter and translate your feeds. Additionally, you can geo-code your favourite feeds and browse them on an interactive map. Their Power widgets and badges can be applied to any website.

Paper.li

This tool turns you into a “newspaper” editor by simply allowing you to combine your topics of interest into a newspaper, whether this involves articles, videos or photos. This collection of content can then be shared on Facebook, Twitter and Google+ with your peers.

Pearltrees

Can be defined as a social curation tool which lets you organise, discover and share web content. Simply bookmark or “pearl” things you like online and organise different categories into different “pearltrees”. The great thing about this tool though is that it lets you discover other people’s “pearls” and follow their activities. You’ll see what others add in real time and enjoy discoveries on the topics you and your brand care about. You can share your pearltree on any website as well as Twitter and Facebook. Additionally, it provides you with a collaborative interest graph.

SocialOomph

This is a cloud based application which offers Twitter, Facebook and blogging management services. You can easily schedule tweets, auto-follow and send auto direct messages. The purpose of this tool is to create a reservoir of social media updates, constantly dripping content into your social media accounts.

Dlvr.it

Provides marketers, bloggers and brands to expand their reach on social networks. It takes content from RSS feeds or other inputs and distributes it to audiences via social networks including Twitter and Facebook. The great thing is that you can see and measure your content reach as well as audience engagement. Furthermore the impact of mentions and retweets can be quantified to see who is consuming and where.

oDesk

The purpose is to help employers and contractors to find market talent to recruit as well as building working relationships. It simplifies the process of looking for partners and relevant sites online through its social research feature.

Socialenhancer

This application can be described as a direct monitor of behaviour patterns and likely responses of conversational subjects. Meaning that you can gain insights into which conversational methods to employ in any situation. A popular feature is its ability to recognise who is talking about you in threads and tell you who to stimulate positive responses from.

Keep in mind that tools are here to support your social efforts on a greater scale, but don’t forget that the beauty of social is human interaction with each other. At the heart of social is simply building and cultivating relationships with others.

Tools like those mentioned above enable such an interaction. And what’s more, as today’s presentation suggested, they let you interact with your network on a budget.