One of my favorite tools of all time is one I often find marketers have never heard of. A colleague told me just last week they hadn’t heard of it. Seriously? I can’t figure out how they managed to miss it. This single tool can help you get the ball rolling for all of your social media, brand management and online reputation management campaigns, and assist you with content creation and link building. It alone has saved me countless hours of mind numbing work  and possible carpal tunnel.

It is, of course, Knowem (like “know ‘em”).

In essence, Knowem signs up for all your social media profiles for you. Like, 300 of them. Run an agency and frequently sign up social media accounts for clients? Save your interns from carpal tunnel and sign up for one of their plans. If you work for a large organization with many brands to manage, again save your interns the pain and sign up for a plan.

Even as a smaller business, on a tighter marketing budget, you can still make use of Knowem without paying a cent, if you can spend a bit of time with it.

Check Your Name

First of all, the most obvious use is that you can check your username or brand name for free. Knowem displays which social sites have that name available, and links off to them so you can go sign up manually.

You can do this without even registering, but if you sign up for a free account you can keep track of which sites you’ve signed up for without doing the manual searching. This is particularly helpful as new sites get added.

Cover Your *ss

If your name is common or trademarked, you likely want to control it across the entire web. While Knowem doesn’t quite include every social network, it comes pretty close, and gets you everything from the most popular sites like Twitter and Facebook, to obscure ones like Scoopeo.

And you can check if all the versions of your domain have been registered, including the random .aero TLD.

Discovery

Best of all, though, is that you can find some really unique, niche social networks that you never would have known existed otherwise. These sites can end up becoming part of your social media or content strategy.

Take Scoopeo, for example, which bills itself as a French social bookmarking site. If you’re doing international SEO, you might want to check into a site like this. Blog about fitness? Check Knowem’s Health tab for sites to share your content on. Looking for new content ideas? Browse through the sites listed and see what’s popular. There are as many ideas as there are sites.

On the whole, Knowem is one of those tools that internet marketers must have in their toolbox, regardless of whether you specialize in social media or search engine optimization, and no matter your budget.