Top Social Media Tools for Small Businesses
Today’s post comes from Rivka Kawano via Agorapulse.
Despite how often we use social media in our personal lives, social media success is still challenging from a business standpoint. When operating with limited time and money, responding to Tweets and taking care of Facebook messages can seem unimportant and overwhelming, and can fall into last place on your list of to-dos. But it can’t be ignored; social media is a major source of brand awareness and customer service for small and medium businesses.
Check out these social media tools to free up your time, make communication between your team members more fluid, and help your business better reach your marketing and sales goals.
And best of all, many of these tools are low-cost or free!
Agorapulse is an all-in-one tool that gives you a powerful way to manage your social media. Not only can you schedule your future posts to Facebook or Twitter on a content calendar, you can also flag relevant conversations for later reference, monitor search terms, and manage all your profiles for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in one place.
Why It Works for Small Businesses:
Agorapulse is a great solution for small businesses because of the team features, allowing one person to flag a specific post to be replied to by another person. Get everyone on board to ensure you’re making the most of your team’s time. Additionally,if you want to track your results on social media, you can easily download the results of your campaigns along with the demographics of your social media following.
Cost:
Free for access to the Facebook Page Barometer and Timeline Contest Manager. Plans range from $29/month for an account with one Twitter page, one Facebook page, and one Instagram page, up to $199/month for plans with up to 10 accounts linked for each platform and advanced features.
Buffer is a content scheduling tool that allows you to curate and create content for your social media, then post it quickly and efficiently across a wide range of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. Using the tool’s browser extension, you can easily add a blog post or website that you discover when browsing.
You can add RSS feeds directly in Buffer to find more content, as well as see which posts get the most views and engagement with a built-in analytics tool. Contributions and varying levels of team access mean that you can work collaboratively and control who is allowed to post what.
Why It Works for Small Businesses:
Buffer is a simple and streamlined tool, meaning that it will be easy to train your team and get them using it consistently. And you will make sure that you don’t have down time in your content posting by being able to schedule in advance.
Cost:
Free for the basic plan allowing you to schedule up to 10 posts and connect one profile for each platform. Paid plans range from $10/month for 12 social profiles and 2 team members all the way up to $300 a month for their largest plans.
Tweriod is a quick and easy tool to help you make the most out of your Twitter content by showing you the best times of the day to post in order to get the most visibility and interaction. Simply log in with Twitter and request your report.
Tweriod also integrates with Buffer so that you can take this data and maximize the times your posts get sent out in your Buffer queue.
Why It Works for Small Businesses:
You may not always have the time and resources to create as much content as you need to get the most visibility, especially on Twitter. By focusing your content at the best time you can make the most of what you have to work with.
Cost:
Free for accounts with 1,000 followers or less. Premium plans are available for larger accounts and more frequent monitoring ranging from $5 to $20 for one time reports, or $3.99 to $15 a month for ongoing plans.
If you are someone who struggles to come up with content on a regular basis, then you will love PostPlanner. It has a vast and ever changing library of sharable images, suggested status updates, and recommended content. You can even create your own searches to come back to again and again, and put content on auto-repeat that you want to share on a regular basis.
Why It Works for Small Businesses:
Often in a small business, you don’t have the luxury of one person dedicated to content creation directly. Being able to get a headstart on the content ideas can save a lot of time. If you’re lucky enough to have the help of coworkers, you can easily add multiple team members to your account and control how much freedom they have over posting content.
Cost:
Pricing ranges from $7/month for up to 5 connected profiles and 50 posts per day up to $199/month for unlimited posting plans.
Click to Tweet is a tool designed to help people share your content and spread the message about your business; you can track the result of your efforts and see how many people are tweeting your link, among other things. They also have a Wordpress plugin that makes an easy way to get people to tweet links to your blog posts and calls to action.
Why It Works for Small Businesses:
Small businesses rely on other people sharing their content in social media to be able to continue to get the message to more people. This tool makes such sharing easier-- and you track the analytics of which tweets get the most traction.
Cost: Free!
These tools make starting out on social media scalable and achievable for your business. While you may have to use a combination of these tools for your social media marketing efforts, the time savings that each tool offers will be well worth it. If you’re interested in the top Salesforce apps for businesses, click here. If you’d like to discuss social publishing solutions for your organization, let us know!
