The top five social and marketing tools for small business in 2012

The criteria for inclusion on this list of "top new social and marketing business tools" is for the tool or service to be online (i.e. not a gadget or traditional business), related to social networking and media/marketing, and new (ish).

The tools/services also have to be either free or nearly free and offer great potential or value - something that makes you sit up and go, "Ah! That's useful.".

The idea behind this list is to help entrepreneurs, small business and startups increase their productivity, establish themselves as leaders in their industry, grow their social following, build authority and trust, drive sales and all the important goodies that go into making a success of your business.

Regardless of whether you are selling cupcakes or oil rigs, it's worth checking out how these tools can help you make important business connections, increase your online visibility and generally help you to succeed at whatever it is your doing.

Before we count down the top five, here's a list of products and services that are also worth checking out.

Notable marketing, social & SEO services

• Free SEO report card
• Send 500 FREE email newsletters with your VerticalResponse trial!
• Let Campaigner help you grow your business and build your relationships with your customers. Start your risk FREE 30 day trial today.
• Need More Qualified Leads? Use HubSpot's Inbound Marketing System. Try our FREE 30-Day Trial!
• Build your own Social Network!
• Announce Your company News to the World with the Best Performing Press Release Service
• Top 10 Search Engine Exposure - Just $9.99/month

1. Google search plus your world

Ok, so Google search plus your world is actually two tools in one. It is a combination of Google search (not that new, but very widely used) and Google+, which is Google's entrance into the social networking market. Google+ has grown phenomenally since its introduction in 2011 and word is that the peeps over at Google+ are aiming to have 1 billion users within a year. Will be interested to see if they can get there.

By combining Google+ into Google search, Google have ushered in a new era in which content marketers (that's business people like you and me) have a socially integrated search platform for delivering highly relevant results based on the combined wisdom of the whole world (that's Google search's traditional results) and the wisdom of your social network (people you choose to follow on Google+ because you like what they talk about).

Google search plus your world is going to have fairly far reaching effects on how small business gets its marketing message across. It's now possible to leapfrog all the SEO efforts that major companies have put in to get their webpages to the top of SERPs (Search engine results pages) by making the right contacts and building up a social following with which to share your content.

Check out this article on how Google search plus your world will affect business PR in 2012.

2. HARO (Help a reporter out)

HARO is a great site for keeping tabs on what information the media is after. Sign up for free and start receiving emails containing categorized lists of queries for interviews and information requested by various bloggers, journalists and news websites.

One of the real benefits of using HARO is not necessarily finding an appropriate story pitch for your site, but the opportunity to cultivate media contacts by helping journos out when they're in need. By providing them with the benefit of your knowledge and skills you can make some potentially crucial media contacts that can be leveraged when the time comes to launch a new startup or product.

I will admit that many of the queries presented each day won't really apply to you. But, it's really not that hard to skim the list of requests as and when the emails arrive. If there's something worth your time, you can respond directly to the reporter - a far better way to contact them than cold calling through their news websites.

It amounts to free PR for your business.

3. design-a-webpage

design-a-webpage.com is an instant webpage designer and Internet marketing hybrid service. It allows you to create professional marketing quality landing pages that are designed for a specific purpose. Examples include product sales pages, portfolio pages, polls, and lead capture pages.

By handling all the underlying marketing tasks that leading Internet marketers and web designers do manually, design-a-webpage gives you the ability to drive traffic and convert it at extremely high rates, maximizing your return on investment.

Check out this product marketing webpage I created of my latest book entitled "Internet marketing with WordPress.

Anyone from bloggers to startups to conglomerates or complete web novices can make use of design-a-webpage because there is no code or web design experience required. All the marketing juice you need to add to your pages is broken down and explained - it's like "joining the dots" for instant internet marketing goodness.

4. Timely

I liked Timely from the moment I landing on their front page. They make everything easy, which is a huge plus in my book no matter what the service is about.

This service, however, is about maximizing the effectiveness of your social media tweets (Twitter) by having timely analyze your previous tweets to find out when they performed the best. Using this information, plus a few other things, they then hold onto your tweets and release them to the twittosphere as and when they think the tweets will garner the most attention.

What's great about this service, again, is that it's so easy. Send your tweets to Timely and forget about it. They'll do the rest and you should immediately begin to benefit from the extra attention. They've also got some analytics in place for your to keep up-to-speed with the performance of your tweets - super helpful for understanding out what is working and what isn't.

5. topulo.us

topulo.us pronounced top-u-lous is a great social platform for providing forecasts and predictions about the future of things you are interested in or an expert in. The idea behind topulo.us is that by making predictions (which can't be edited once saved to the site) and forecasts about the future, you can prove to the world once and for all that you do actually know more about stuff than anyone else.

If you're a broker and you can show unequivocally that your forecasts are accurate, you can quickly build up plenty of social buzz and a huge following of people who want to get a glimpse of what you see in the future.

Here's a prediction about the future of Twitter that I don't think will come true, but it serves to demonstrate the type of thing someone in the marketing world might put out there to stir up some controversy ;)

Google search plus your world will kill off Twitter within two years

Not only that, but you have space to justify and explain your prediction and cite several references. Herein lies a sneaky way to make a bit of cash because along with links to white papers and other research, you can link to products and services or affiliate partners.

Generate buzz, gain a following, earn some cash. Not bad for one small piece of content.