Most small businesses are short on time and definitely don’t have excess time to find and learn new social media tools to help them achieve their online marketing goals. Given that Envisager Studio is a web development and social media marketing firm, we thought it would be helpful to other small businesses to have a few recommended social media tools as a starting point to at least give them an idea of what may work best for their small business.
It’s also a good idea to have a plan. For example, what is the audience you desire to reach? What are you trying to achieve? You will notice that a few of our 10 must have social media tools below have similar features, so this is why you should have a goal so that your efforts are not duplicated.
Hootsuite is a great app website for scheduling posts across social media which makes it more convenient for you to send posts during the most popular times for your social following. This is a great tool for sites with traffic that peaks during lunch and/or evening, or for the busy marketers who need to multitask and sitting in front of Twitter all day is not an option.
Socialbakers helps you to better understanding how your brand stacks up against your competitors using their Analytics Pro tools. You can enter social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and gain valuable insight into channel growth, find out which channel contributors are most active, and channel engagements rates.
Komfo offers a good analytic tool for Facebook page content based on fan penetration, viral amplification (this goes beyond what Facebook insights feature provides), click-through-rate, and spam score.
FixYourFunnel is an Infusionsoft-specific tool that allows you to capture leads with pre-recorded telephone messages, collect data via SMS, call monitoring and more. This is a high-end service for serious marketers on-the-go. To get a real appreciation for the features and capabilities of FixYourFunnel, please visit the website.
Buffer and Hootsuite have similarities, but unique differences as social media management software. They both support Facebook pages, LinkedIn company pages and groups, but Hootsuite offers a few more social networks to connect to. Bottom line, Buffer ensures that shared posts are spread out and timed perfectly, while Hootsuite provides easier management of company accounts and in depth metrics.
Sprout Social is another great post scheduling and social network management software. The affordable price, alluring UI and initial free 30 day trial has an attractive appeal to small business owners.
SocialFlow is the first social media optimization technology to apply a scientific approach to understanding the real-time value of content on the social graph. With unparalleled access to the Twitter and Facebook data streams, the company developed the SocialFlow AttentionScore™ technology that is able to understand and quantify audience, attention, topics and engagement to provide an accurate value assessment of social media content for brands and businesses.
Constant Contact email marketing software is easy to use with a simple UI. List management, tracking, and deliverability would be the most difficult to duplicate on your own. It is also nice to have templates or you can access the advanced settings and upload code from a custom newsletter that perhaps your graphic designer has created for you. Constant Contact automatically prevents you from sending to those who unsubscribe as required by the CAN-SPAM Act. Constant Contact works with ISP’s to improve deliverability rates. You get click tracking and open statistics. It prevents you from getting on SPAM list to keep your regular email from being tagged as SPAM.
Tagboard is an excellent way to monitor your hashtags (keywords) across multiple social media channels. It’s useful to anyone who monitors their own brand or other people’s brands as a part of their business. If you’re a small business owner and don’t want to invest in social media monitor, this free social media tool can be especially useful for your small business. From within Tagboard, you can even reply to conversations.
Argyle Social is social media dashboard designed to assist professional marketers in executing campaigns and optimizing their social ROI.
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