Over the past year I’ve really worked at giving a variety of web browsers a fair shake at becoming my go to browser for every day use.  I’ve used the major players such as IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and even gave RockMelt a spin (see here for my review of that platform).  While I have found myself predominately using Chrome for a variety of reasons such as speed, performance, UI and quite frankly I love the extension platform.  I’m not alone as usage of Chrome has climbed past 20% market share.

With my increased usage, I’ve come across a variety of social media themed extensions that I have tried out, and the following 5 are the ones I find the most useful and worthy of my screen real estate. 

HootSuite Hootlet – Obviously more useful if you are using HootSuite, but useful nonetheless, the Hootlet extension allows you to quickly and easily share web links to your social media channels.  If you are using HootSuite, it’s especially great as the links use their web shortener which provide you analytics so you have access to your sharing data.

WebRank SEO – I love this extension as it gives me quick access to website info such as Pagerank, Alexa, as well as pages indexed by engine and backlinks.  It’s a great way to get a snapshot of your sites and where they are, as well as competing sites.

LinkedIn For Chrome – LinkedIn can easily be forgotten when it comes to social channels and sharing content, but this extension helps keep it front and center and easy to share to ensure you’re not missing out on this audience.

Xmarks & Lastpass – I group these together since Lastpass actually acquired Xmarks last year.  Both invaluable productivity tools as Xmarks allows you to keep your bookmarks in sync across multiple browsers and computers, while Lastpass gives you secure cloud storage of your passwords and frequently filled in form info.

Awesome Screenshot – What a cool little tool!  Makes it quick and easy to grab screenshots and annotate them as needed, then send off or save.  Another great productivity tool built right in.

What are some of your favorite Chrome Extensions?

For quite some time Tweetdeck was my preferred choice when it came to social media management software.  I’ve typically chosen software based solutions over web based ones for speed and performance when it comes to high touch computing.  And for awhile Tweetdeck was meeting my needs, but I just grew increasingly more frustrated with performance issues with the Adobe Air platform.  Constant software hangs, and slow downs just finally got to me and I decided it was time to take another look at Hootsuite.

I’m glad I did as I’ve really enjoyed the user experience with Hootsuite.  I’m actually finding myself preferring the web based experience.  It certainly doesn’t suffer from the slow downs I experienced with Tweetdeck.

So here is my short list of things so far that have me loving Hootsuite vs Tweetdeck:

1. Tabs – Love the tabs.  Makes it dead simple from a UI perspective to organize multiple clients.
2. Short Link & Monitoring – Love the ow.ly integration and how I can quickly get click stream information on what I share.  Combined with the Hootlet bookmarklet, it’s a great system.
3. Web Based – Actually faster performance then Tweetdeck’s desktop application.  Also really like the fact that I can login anywhere and have access to my setup as is.
4. Premium Upgrades – Moving to Hootsuite was not only a win for me personally, but also professionally as I will definitely consider their Pro and Enterprise level offerings for my team.  It’s great to have the flexibility to grow into something like that and the additional features around collaboration.

What’s your preferred solution?

As a thank you to those that visit and contribute to my blog, I’ve wanted to do some sort of giveaway for awhile, but wanted it to be somewhat relevant to what I do and write about.  My blog certainly doesn’t generate crazy amounts of traffic or revenue, so I couldn’t exactly get too crazy, but I think I’ve come up with something pretty cool.

So what’s the prize package you ask?  To one lucky reader I will be giving away the following social media book package:

• Socialnomics by Erik Qualman
• The Social Media Bible by Lon Safko
• Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
• The New Community Rules: Marketing On The Social Web by Tamar Weinberg
• Why Now Is The Time To Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk

These are all books I have read and enjoyed and think you will too.  Yes, I must disclose they are “used”, but they are all in new condition as I pretty much read them very quickly and they’ve just been sitting in my office since then.  I figured I might as well let a lucky reader enjoy them.

BONUS!!  In addition to one copy of all the books above, I’ll throw in one copy of Tweetadder ($55 value) to the winner if they have tweeted/re-tweeted this post during the contest!

Overall that’s about a $150 prize package.  Not too shabby for a personal blog giveaway eh? 

So what do you have to do?  Pretty simple.  Just leave a comment on this blog post with one of your favorite social media websites or blogs that you frequent.  I figure why not get some great content in the process!  Be sure to leave some sort of contact information so if chosen you can be contacted.  Preferably a twitter username (so I can follow you if I’m not already), personal blog link or something that you are comfortable with.

Winner will be chosen at random on Friday, September 10th and will be contacted immediately at which point I’ll ship out to you at my expense.

Good luck to everyone and much thanks for all your continued support.