Social media marketing can be cumbersome for small business who cannot afford to hire someone on specifically to manage social media. There are multiple log ins and if you have your own personal accounts that can get downright messy! Then you have the problem of monitoring all your networks!
Thankfully there are loads of social media tools for businesses out there to try and lighten the burden of managing a social media presence on top of everything else. Don’t get too caught up in all the little tools that are floating around out there, remember that growing a social media presence can be done without any of these but also recognize when certain ones that can optimize or save you time! Here are a few social media tools for business that I recommend:
This web-based software is quite effective at consolidating your social media efforts into one central hub. Allows you to pick out social networks to send specific messages to, for example: Lets say you want to send an update to your Foursquare and Twitter accounts but not your Facebook, this is easily done through Hootsuite by selecting those specific networks and crafting an update. This alleviates the signing in to multiple websites and copying and pasting needed to do the same process manually. Hootsuite can be a huge time saver if you are worried about having to manage a lot of different networks.
Pros:
- Makes sharing to all your accounts easy.
- Hootsuite browser button makes it easy to quickly share things while browsing the web.
- Can schedule out your social media updates to make sure the maximum amount of eyes see your updates.
- Strong support and consistent updates means Hootsuite will always be fairly up to date on the largest
- social networks.
Cons:
- Posts to Facebook as a 3rd party app, this means your edgerank (What Facebook uses to determine how relevant your updates are to the people who follow you) is degraded some.
- Only supports up to 5 social networks on a free account, but the price point for an upgraded account is very reasonable ($6.99/month at the time of writing this with no commitment)
This is a free tool that lets you check how you are doing on your edgerank. If you’ve never heard of edgerank I’ll give you a brief rundown: Edgerank is Facebook’s algorithm to determine how updates are seen on a user’s newsfeed, obviously we want to be as close to the top of user’s news feeds as we can get. To get a higher edgerank we need to encourage interaction. You can use Edgerankchecker.com to determine how your Edgerank is lining up against other pages. This is useful for making sure you are getting the most out of your Facebook pages.
Great tool for Twitter. This neat little application lets you check to see what times your Twitter followers are on. This is great for determining when to send out tweets to get the most interaction and retweets! When you combine this application with Hootsuite you can schedule your tweets any time of the day and make sure they are going out during the most optimal times.
A great tool for creating dynamic presentations. This can be helpful for making a larger point than 160 characters allows you to. It’s also somewhat of a social network too so it can help get more eyes on your business.
Hubspots free marketing grader is a great way to find out what parts you are missing in your sales funnel. Knowing where you could be leaking customers is incredibly valuable. I encourage you to check it out and see what kind of grade you get.
These tools should help you focus and manage the beast that is social media for small business. Are there any that I forgot that you currently use? Leave a comment and let me know what I missed. I love learning about new tools.
