Every year, Michael Stelzner and the diligent folks at Social Media Examiner prepare a social media marketing industry report that shows how marketers are using social media to promote their businesses.

If you’re doing social media for yourself or for clients, this 42-page report is one that you absolutely need to download and study.

You will want to examine all the research and charts and discover some of the ‘not-so-obvious’ findings that are contained in the report.

I created an infographic to give you a little glimpse of the actual report. Remember, this is just a tiny sliver of the valuable information contained in the report so do yourself a big favor and go to Social Media Examiner to download the real thing!

Are you looking for ways to enhance your blogging process?

Do you need some tools to help you stay productive?

Here are six tools that could make your life easier and faster.

#1. Trello

Trello is pretty neat. It is a project management platform that allows users to work on a project from different locations. It provides an interface that can be accessed by all members of a team so that they may complete tasks. It is especially useful for virtual team collaboration.

If you manage a multi-author blog, you can use Trello to assign blog projects to your writers, keep track of everyone’s progress, and communicate instructions or due dates.  Trello comes with boards, cards, lists and labels to maximize communication and productivity.

#2. Dropbox

Dropbox allows you to easily share files between different computers and devices (iPhones, iPads, laptops, and desktops) while integrating seamlessly with Windows and other platforms on your device. If you work with other writers you can easily share files with one another without having to email them back and forth thus wasting precious bandwidth.

What makes this an awesome tool is that your Dropbox account automatically syncs with all your other devices. So if you were to save a file on your desktop at work, it would be accessible from your laptop at home or on your iPhone on your way to work. It is secure and all your files are backed up online where any user can access them on their device just by logging in.

#3. Buffer

As a blogger you rely heavily on Twitter to broadcast your blog posts, share great content and network with peers. But this takes a lot of time, which you don’t have especially if you manage several Twitter accounts.

Buffer app not only allows you to schedule your tweets in advance, but to do so for each account that you manage. Even better Buffer offers many extensions, apps and extras that allow you to schedule and share content on different platforms, devices, and browsers e.g. Chrome, FireFox and Safari; on Facebook and Twitter; from Google Reader or on your smartphone and more!

#4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media dashboard that helps you to manage all your social media accounts from one central location.

It provides a user-friendly interface that displays all of your social profiles (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)  in an organized way so that you can manage your posts, updates and direct messages more efficiently, in real time.

Instead of having all your social media accounts open at once trying to navigate back and forth, Hootsuite allows you to view and update them all in one place. This certainly qualifies as efficient and productive.

#5. Evernote

Ever forget something cool or important that you came across during the day that you wish you could remember?

Well Evernote is here to help. Evernote is a tool that allows you to save  and store any information you come across online at any time. It is compatible with your smartphone, tablet and computer so when you see something interesting and you don’t have time to read it you can save it on your phone and read it later that day.

As a blogging tool Evernote can be used for managing and sharing your editorial calendar, for storing and syncing your ideas for articles, for storing all elements of your articles (i.e. images, links, keywords, tags, etc.) and more.

#6. Join.me

Join.me is one of the cooler apps in this list. It allows up to ten users to share screens (and even share control of other users’ screens!) while chatting or talking online.

When you type “join.me” in a new browser, a small screen appears prompting you to either share your screen or view someone else’s screen. The prompts are easy to follow and you’re able to join others or have them join you on your screen.

This is a great tool for demonstrating tasks that are difficult to explain verbally. Just remember to log out when you’re done because other users can see everything that’s on your screen as long as you’re logged on. It is simple, practical and easy to understand.

I recently read Mark Schaefer’s new book ‘Return on Influence,’ which in a nut shell talks about ‘personal power’ and influence on the social web.

So if you have a social media account, your value and relevance on social channels is constantly being judged and evaluated by Klout. I cannot begin to tell you how distasteful that thought is to me personally.

But in today’s post, I’m not going to persuade you to become a Klout-hater like me. I simply wish to suggest to you that there are ways (good old fashioned ones for that matter!) to achieve online influence whether Klout says so or not. Here are 12 of them:

What are your thoughts? Have I completely missed the point? Feel free to educate me!