This week’s most useful new social media tools and platforms

This is the fifth of a weekly series, in which every week, we’ll look at five social media tools and platforms that have created some buzz over the last week.

First, be sure to check out Social Statistics, which tracks the most popular users on Google+. It wasn’t supposed to be released yet, and it’s still in early Alpha, so not all of the accounts have been parsed into the system just yet. If you want to speed up the process, just head over to Google+, find your unique identifier in your profile URL, then go over to SocialStatistics and paste it at the bottom of the page. See a full demonstration of how to use it here.

Here are five other goodies that stood out from the crowd…

1. Create outlet specific dashboards with geeje.com – This could be one of the most useful tools we’ve seen in a while, especially if you want to keep your eye on specific competitors. Geeje.com works by creating personalised feeds of brands / people you want to follow closely. All you need to do is set up your brand / person tab, add the URL feeds you’re interested in and geeje keeps them updated in real-time so you don’t miss a thing. Very handy!
2. Narrow down your Facebook searches with Facebooksearch.us – This is a quick and easy way to search for content on Facebook by key types e.g. posts, photos, people, pages, groups and events. It only returns ‘public’ results so you won’t see everything, but it’s a good starting point. The specific photos search option allows you to search through millions of photos located on Facebook pages.
3. Discover what you love with Google’s wdyl.com – This is a really nice concept from the busy bods at Google. ‘What Do You Love’ enables you to search by interest areas and returns results as sorted into Google gadgets / categories. This is a nice way to get an ‘at-a-glance’ look at where people can interact with content by web sub-sections. Take a look at my Dogs example here.
4. Convert your Flash content to HTML5 with Google Swiffy – Although still in development stage, Google Swiffy is a handy way to turn those troublesome Flash web pages into the more universally acceptable HTML5 format. Check out the gallery section for some examples.
5. Mash up your Facebook photos into a music video with Masher – More proof that creating solid web content can be performed by almost anyone. This easy-to-use app allows you to ‘drag and drop’ content into a basic editor which helps turn your static images into a video and supporting soundtrack.