Online marketers are among the busiest kinds of power users; with a huge sum of their work actually hotwired into the social Web itself. And aside from the regular Facebook and Twitter usage, marketers may also need to deal with hundreds of niche social networks that cater to specific markets, fields of interests, and even regions of the world.

Because of this, constant engagements, content distributions, and regular stat measurements, among other online marketing-geared tasks, can be painfully time consuming. So to aid our online marketers accomplish these tasks, there are a lot of Web apps readily available. One of the latest solutions to come out of the social media woodwork is Alternion.

Alternion is a free, feature-rich social media aggregator that pulls in social networks and e-mail, and presents these in organized feeds on a straightforward interface. As a social media aggregator and communications tool, you can view, manage and post on your social media sites, and send e-mails without leaving your Alternion profile page.

As of writing, the service aggregates more than 200 social media services including today’s most popular ones, and a good selection of niche pages. The selection includes your usual generic social networking sites, blogging platforms, multimedia sites, and news bookmarking tools, as well as networks that cater to specific fields of interests like movies and TV, gaming, travel, shopping, and books.

The e-mail feature, on the other hand, allows you to hook Alternion up with Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Windows Live Mail, AOL Mail, and just about any IMAP/POP-based e-mail application.

The site itself is a social network, allowing you to connect to other users, send direct messages to each other, and join communities. And like all social networks, you can personalize your profile page with a bio, a user image, and even customize the look of your profile page—the color scheme, and you can even include a background image.

It carries the generic paneled layout though, so usage is pretty idiot-proof. At the onset, the news feed will present you with a mashup of all the updates and latest posts scraped off from all your networks. You can filter through them by content type like Status Updates, Links, Blogs, Comments, as well as Photos, Videos, and Audio.

Though it’s still in Beta, Alternion’s current crop of features makes it a great tool for users looking to maximize their time while boosting the follower engagements, content distribution, and messaging aspects of their social media campaigns. And just like any Web 2.0 product, it’ll most likely be in constant development even past Beta, so we can definitely expect a handful of enhancements and new features in the future.

Tags: Alternion, online marketing, social media marketing, social networks, Tool Time