By Bruce Townsend, Actinic

Keeping track of social networking activity is a growing challenge for today’s online marketer.  There are some great tools for managing particular sites – like Tweetdeck for managing your Twitter accounts. But for day-to-day use across the most important sites, I’ve found nothing better than Flock.

Described as ‘The Social Web Browser’, Flock uses the Firefox engine, but adds some great features that help you monitor and manage your main social media accounts.

The sidebar displays posts from friends on Digg, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. You can post to Twitter and Facebook accounts simultaneously, send private messages, or Digg the current page. You can track your own Twitter Mentions, and create filters that monitor for specific key words and phrases. Flock also links to other social and media sites including MySpace, Picasa and del.icio.us, and a variety of blogging platforms.

Flock’s blog editor can post directly to blog accounts on Blogger, WordPress and Typepad, to name a few; or to your own self-hosted blogs.  Its web clipboard allows you to drag and drop text, images and links from any web pages to the sidebar. From there you can drag them to the blog editor or any other application. This makes it a powerful research tool.

Flock’s built-in RSS reader is one of the most flexible, allowing you to group, merge and sort feeds from many sources. If you visit a page with a feed available, it will notify you, and you can subscribe in one click.

Flock can preview your Google and Yahoo! emails directly in the browser. Unfortunately Hotmail is not supported. Finally, the Photo Uploader enables you to upload images to social media accounts that accept them.

It needs to cover more sites, Reddit being an obvious omission. But it’s still my favourite social media tool.

What’s yours?