To everyone responsible for social media at your credit union, I feel for you. Because frankly, there are too many options out there, and only so many minutes in a day: Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, Google+, LinkedIn, Youtube, Pinterest, Posterous, Instagram..

It feels like the social media space has become so oversaturated, something has to shake out – doesn’t it?

Well, a few of the others will likely get swallowed up by the bigger animals, but no matter what you think of all of these social apps, most aren’t going away very soon.

Okay, so how do you deal with all of it? What else? Get another app.

There are lots of free and low cost apps that track social media. With most of these, you can keep tabs on what’s being said about your credit union, your competition and industry. The free ones are basically focused on mentions in one place such as Twitter, so if you want to link all of your accounts and pull reports you may need to look at the paid ones.

If nothing else, start with Google’s alerts, which will email you when your CU gets mentioned online. It’s not immediate notification, but even a once-a-day email is a beginning, and, like Google analytics for your web site, it’s free. Other names that come up for free alerts are Twilert (for Twitter) and Social Mention (searches for mentions in blogs, videos, comments, etc.).

Two of the most common ways to manage your accounts seem to be Tweet Deck (free — lets you manage your Twitter account), and Hootsuite (free and subscription versions that allow you to monitor and report across various SM sites.) Other social media monitoring options include Trackur (free and paid versions), and Viralheat (three levels of paid).

If you are more concerned about who you reach, look at Twitalyzer (Twitter analytics on who and how to target), and Follower Wonk (allows you to search Twitter and analyze followers).

If you are simply wondering how you rank in the social world, check out HowSociable (gives you a score on each social site — if it can find you), and Tweet Grader (lets you find out how you rank in the twitterverse). Twitter Sentiment (started by Stanford grad students and hosted by Google) and Tweetfeel both will let you know how people feel about a topic, while Klout lets you see your online influence.

What was that? Have I just given you too many options?

Sorry. But keep in mind that a listing here is not a recommendation, nor do I use them all. I’m also sure there are more, but I got a little “fatigued” trying to list them all. So if you have a favorite that you want to share, let us know!