Google+ Statistics: it has the top 100 users on Google+. Better yet, it shows you which discussions on Google+ are getting the most attention. A good place to start looking for people to connect on that site.

Google Plus Directory: another cool place to start looking for people to connect with on Google+. It lets you filter them by the number of people they follow, their followers, gender, and other factors.

Google+ Hangout Directory: want to hang out with friends and contacts on Google+? Maybe you are looking for interesting hangouts in this community. Either way, this directory can help.

Please share your favorite Google+ directories below.

Trunk.ly allows you to import and keep track of your information on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and your RSS feed. Any links that you have retweeted or shared on Twitter will be added to your timeline on Trunk.ly. Links can be imported from Tumblr, Posterous, and Google Reader too.

Trunk.ly does have a set of tools for publishers to help them keep track of how many times their stories are being shared on social media sites.

Trunk.ly can be a life saver of a service for those of you who share a lot of links (or re-share them) on top social networks. The process is mostly automated and saves you time. What more can you ask?

In case you have been surfing the Web a lot lately, you may have seen those sites that take advantage of footer bar to promote social media profiles and related RSS feeds. Thanks to services such as Skysa, you can build your own social media bar and give your visitors more ways to interact with your website and connect with you on social networking websites.

Skysa footer bars essentially add a task-bar to your website. So your users can open up different windows on your website and even join your chat-room. Designing your own Skysa is not that difficult. All you have to do is provide your information and pick the design you feel fit your website’s layout the best.

What I like about Skysa bars is all the apps that you can add to your bar. So whether you want to promote your Twitter account or let others to connect with you on YouTube, there is an app for that. Here are just a few apps you can add to your footer bar:

• Chat Room
• Facebook Fan page
• Flickr
• Google Maps
• Navigation Widget
• RSS Feed
• Translate
• Twitter
• Voting Poll
• YouTube

If you are an advanced user, you can add you own widgets to your bar. So you’ll have plenty of ways to add more interactivity to your website.

Footer bars are truly underrated. It’s true that a lot of people may not pay attention to your bar, but some visitors do. By giving them more ways to interact with your website, you only help build a more solid community around your website. Considering that Skysa’s bars are for free, there is no reason not to try them.

There are plenty of Twitter automation tools around. These days you can automate anything from sending messages, planning direct messages, and more with your Twitter account. Just because you can do it, doesn’t mean you should do it. There is such a thing as Black-Hat and White-Hat tweeting. Have you wondered why you get unsolicited messages on Twitter when you talk about topics such as VOIP or Web hosting? There are a lot of people who make a living out of selling these services to others, and Twitter is their next playground. Some have gone even beyond that and send you harmful links wrapped within an innocent @reply. So there are a lot of things that you shouldn’t automate or do no Twitter. But small businesses can certainly benefit from outsourcing some of their Twitter tasks. You don’t want to everything by yourself and lose sight of what really matters.

If you are looking to manage multiple accounts, vet followers, or find suitable people to follow, the following 4 Twitter automation tools come in handy:

Tweet Adder: one of the most powerful and controversial Twitter automation tools on the market. Let’s you do all kinds of research on Twitter and even find friends to follow fast. The controversial feature (auto-follow) is best left to black-hats. But there are a lot of positive things you can get done with Twitter including but not limited to deep research, account management, and friend management.

TwitterFeed: one of the best tools out there if you want to automate feeding your blog to Twitter. You can not only define how often your want your feeds to be posted, you can also define tags for your posts. Your clicks are tracked as well which is a big plus. It’s a free tool.

Humming Bird: comes with everything you need to manage multiple accounts, add friends, and find targeted followers. The service is quite smart and makes following and unfollowing people less of a pain. Basically, it helps you find and friend people who you have not unfollowed before and set yourself up as an authority twitter figure.

Social Oomph: a very handy service that enables you to manage your twitter accounts and connect them to your blogs easily. You can also use it to find people to follow, set up direct messages, unfollow people when they unfollow you, and much more.

If you are planning to abuse the above services, let’s hope you get suspended soon. But if you are truly interested in saving time and effort and build a real Twitter presence, the above tools come in handy. They don’t do everything for you, but they do save time.

The Social Media Bible: if you are new to the social media or just don’t know whether you have been using it to your full advantage, this book is a must read. Provides you with a good overview of what may work for your business.

The New Community Rules – Marketing on the Social Web: if you have been taking advantage of the social media without getting any results, you may want to take a look at this book. It may have the solutions for you.

The Social Media Marketing Book: an easy to understand guide that will show you how your business can take advantage of blogs, social networking sites, and beyond. Great for beginners.

Socialnomics: a very good book on theory. It shows you how the idea of “social” has changed the way companies do business. Shows you how successful businesses are taking advantage of those top social media services.

The Whuffie Factor – Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business: it gives you a run down of how others have taken advantage of the power of community to achieve bigger and better things.

The Digital Handshake: shows you how you can use social media to grow your business and connect with consumers. Covers blogs, social networks, online video, podcasting, mobile marketing, customer ratings systems, and Twitter.

Twitterville – How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods: there is more to social media than Twitter. At the same time, many businesses are taking advantage of Twitter to grow and connect with their customers more effectively. This books shows you how to get that done.

What’s your favorite social media book?

There are a lot of people who are social media junkies. They spend hours on Twitter and forget to take care of things in their real life. A lot of experts argue that people who are into the social media might end up spending more time staying at home and tweeting than engaging in social interactions. One reason for that to happen is when you are struggling to keep up with your daily tasks and managing your social media accounts. The key is to get more done in less time. That’s where Social Oomph comes in. It’s an innovative service that is designed to help you manage and schedule your tweets, track tweets by keywords, and manage your direct messages. These are all tasks that can take a lot of your time but with Social Oomph you can get them done without too much trouble.

The main reason that I use Social Oomph is for its excellent task automation services. I am not talking about scheduling automated tweets. But I do use Social Oomph to manage my follow/unfollow and direct messages. If you have more than just a handful of followers, it’s going to be extremely difficult to manage direct messages. With Social Oomph you can do it easy. You can also use the service to track keywords and set up Google-like alerts. That way the data comes to you instead of you going and searching for it.

Social Oomph, which comes in both free and professional versions, allows you to vet your followers, schedule your tweets in advance, and even import your blog to twitter. So when you post a new blog post, it gets posted to Twitter automatically without you having to do anything special. You can also find new followers and keep your follower/following ratio decent enough to avoid getting flagged by Twitter.

Social Oomph does make it easier to get things done on Twitter, but you don’t want to over automate. Your goal should be to automate tasks that you don’t have to do by yourself. For instance, I like to keep my DMs more personal, and automating the process just doesn’t work right. But I like to follow everyone who follows me. A lot of experts don’t like that, but I see no harm in following people who take time to follow me and read what I have to say. There is a lot of potential for spam here. I rather spend my time dealing with that issue than doing the most straight forward chords by my own. For a free service, Social Oomph packs a lot of features.

Firefox is the best browser for social media warriors. I know. A lot of you may prefer Flock, but I have found flock to be glitchy and sometimes annoying. With Firefox, you are in control of what you want to see on your browser. And thanks to the thousands of plugins that are available for Firefox, you can set up a killer system to tweet and mange your Facebook account right from your browser.

Using Firefox plugins to manage your social media accounts does help you stay more active on Twitter and Facebook and connect with your friends and followers in a more efficient manner. There are plenty of plugins to choose from, and there is no one size fits all when it comes to Firefox plugins. But if you are interested in managing your Twitter and Facebook accounts from your browser, here are 5 top social media plugins you should consider using:

Twitterbar: TwitterBar is one of the easiest plugins to use on FireFox. Instead of having your Twitter window open for tweeting stories, you can set up Twitterbar to tweet your stories in one click. Once you have found an interesting story, you can add your comments in your URL bar and click go!

Yoono: a wonderful add-on for Firefox that makes it so easy to manage your Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking accounts. Great way to share content with your friends and Twitter followers.

Friendbar: keep in touch with friends on Facebook and Twitter by using this plugin. You can also manage your social networking stream, reply, DM and do all kinds of neat stuff without having your Twitter window open.

Shareaholic: as the name suggests, it’s designed for folks who can’t stop giving back and sharing with their fellow community members. Lets you share links, videos, blogs, images with services like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, Gmail, Yahoo. Great way to keep giving back to your network.

TwitterFox: simple but very useful. If you want to use your browser to keep up with your friends on Twitter and share your stories with them, TwitterFox is for you. It’s very simple but gets the job done.

There you have it. 5 cool Firefox social media plugins that let you manage your Twitter, Facebook, and other accounts right from your browser. If you like to be in control and manage your accounts on your browser the way you want, the above plugins come in handy.