10 social media tools for small businesses

Let us assume that you already have a social media account of your choice. And we are all aware that one thing business people don’t have a lot is time. We would however want to make the best use of our social media platforms to reach out to customers. You don’t have to spend too much of your time learning how to manage or managing your social media platform. There are a lot of tools and platforms that can help you track and know how your business performs on social media and what decision to make for the better.

     1.   Google Analytics.

 If by now you don’t have Google analytics installed as someone who has a website or blog, then you better do so. Google Analytics is a free enterprise analytics platform. With GA, you get to know how many visitors you have on your site, their location, how long they stayed on the site and much more. GA also comes with an in-built social media analytics report that helps you track visitors. To get a good picture of how your social media presence is, you need Google analytics.

There are however other analytics tools out there. One such tool is Crazy Egg.

2.    Buffer.

This amazing tool allows you to share or post to all your social media platforms. This tool’s main purpose is scheduling of your posts, thus allowing you to tweet on twitter or post on Facebook or any other social network when your followers are most likely to be there. It automatically post the times that you choose for it to posts, thus you get to reach out to your followers even when you don’t have the time to be on social media.

Buffer can be installed on your browser. It also has mobile apps for both android and iPhone smartphones. You can also link to other apps by using IFTTT (If This Then That).

3.      Do Share.

Do you know that Google+ is reportedly the second largest social media network after Facebook? Yes, that’s the truth. Buffer does not allow you to share to Google+ but Do Share allows sharing to Google+. Take advantage of this tool and bring yourself and business to this fast growing social media site by Google. Though Do Share does not currently has an app, it is a good tool to reach out to your readership or followership.

4.      Bit.ly.

One annoying thing about sharing your links to social media is the existence of very long strings of links that make things clumsy on your social media pages. With bit.ly, you get to shorten all those long links into something short and less clumsy for social media platforms. What bit.ly does is to take a long link like:

 “http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/08/30/understanding-digital-civics/.” and turn it into a short link like: http://bit.ly/113fsqu.  This is very ideal for sites like twitter that allow up to a maximum character of 140. You might ask why you need this when twitter has a tool called t.co that shortens your URLs for you. Though a lot of URL shorterners are good, bit.ly is unique in that it offers an analytics and tracking tool that allows you to have the same short URL on all your social media networks with one dashboard.

5.      Feedly.

For businesses, is not only about yourself, but also about who you follow. You will be missing a lot if all you do is posting about yourself and not sharing other people’s posts. You might probably come across some sites and blogs that produce quality content all the time and you want to keep an eye on them. Then as time goes on, those sites or blogs become many, making it difficult for you to manage them. All you do is select all the sites or blogs that you would like to keep an eye on, and feedly will handle the rest for you. Feedly, as a feed reader gathers all the RSS feeds from all sites and blogs you want to stay on top and list them for you to make it easy to read. It also allow you to share to all your social networks throughout the week.

6.      MailChimp.

One thing that is very vital to businesses is building up your own list or database of email contacts. This helps you in knowing more about your customers as well as potential ones. MailChimp makes things easy for you. It helps you organize your email contacts as well as add their demographics (age, location and gender).

Get to your customers email with your offer by using MailChimp as a great tool. Most MailChimp’s basic features are free but if you want more, then you need to pay. Prices start from $10 a month, which shouldn’t be a problem if you really want to improve your business. This will let you reach out to more than 2,000 subscribers.

7.      edocr.

As I’ve already said, sharing others’ thoughts on social media is a good way of not only building relationships, but also building trust between you and your customers and cleints. Giving stuffs away for free is an excellent and result-oriented content marketing strategy that works and don’t frown your face, because you need to do that: sometimes you should make free giveaways.

Additionally, building trust requires that sometimes you share some of your success stories with your customers or followers. You can do this through an eBook, video, slide share or podcast.

But to share your secret, you will need a file sharing tool. This is where edocr comes in. This is a growing platform with almost 100,000 users. After uploading your eBook to edocr, you will appear in the directory of edocr and you will be searchable for any user of edocr.

An edocr free account gives you a space for only 5 documents, a freelancer for $9 per month which comes with 100 documents or even more for other levels.

8.      LastPass.

For the past few years, I have used a lot of social media sites till an extent that I don’t even remember most of the passwords. I sometimes keep a list of the different passwords I use for my networks. What about you? How many social media accounts do you have? And do you use one password? Or many. What if one tool could give you a pass to access all your social networks and you never have to keep more than one password off head. That is exactly what LastPass does for you.

Don’t risk yourself by using one password across all platforms, because once a hacker gets hold of your password, you are dead. LastPass can work on your computer browser or mobile device. Once you have a LastPass password to access your account, LastPass automatically fills in all your passwords and usernames and so all you now need, is just your LastPass password, and you are good to go. 

9.      Commun.it

This is a social media relationship management tool that helps you to identify who is in your Twitter community-those who support your content and you, either by favouriting, mentioning or retweeting, and those who influence you.

With just a few minutes of your time, commun.it can help you reply to your tweets, thank those who are in your community, find those linked to your site or blog and thank new followers all at once.

Core features of commun.it are free, but for a Pro plan, which comes with full reporting features, unlimited monitor or lead items, you would need to pay a reasonable price.

10.  ManageFlitter

Have you noticed that things can start getting difficult once your twitter followers and following increase? Following a lot of people have a big advantage but sometimes, it also makes you miss important tweets.

Basically, ManageFlitter allows you to root out spam or irrelevant followers as well as quickly identify who is not following you with the option of unfollowing these people in bulk. This is for the free plan. If you want more, then comes other plans where you have to pay. A pro account goes for $12 a month for one twitter account and $24 per month for up to 5 Twitter accounts.

conclusion.

With so many social media outlets out there, you should make sure that you invest in the right tools to reach out to your readership, followers or customers. Make good use of social media because that is probably where most of your customers spend their lives these days.