Today, the success of a small company largely depends on how its managing team works and distributes tasks. To maintain a pace that allows you to compete in the modern market, it is better to use specialized programs and services.
The following article focuses on the latest trends in management tools for social media and presents the best solutions to plan tasks, to communicate within a team, and to store customer data.
About Social Media Tools
Developing your business without an online presence in fierce market conditions is impossible. To be visible and competitive in the arena, you have to present your products or services through social media. Otherwise, you risk dragging behind your competitors.
The best social media tools for small businesses help to build the brand’s recognition, reduce the cost of attracting potential new customers, and provide great customer support. This is, perhaps, the main criterion for small businesses – to increase the economic efficiency of the marketing aimed at boosting media outreach.
Reasons to Use Social Media Tools
Social media channels provide a unique opportunity to establish direct contact with your target audience and to understand their needs better. You can always have a dialogue with your customers and get feedback to improve customer service and the quality of your product. A properly organized marketing strategy allows you to convey information about your company to a larger number of your potential customers and, having established trusting relationships with them, turn them into your regular customers.
Social media tools open before you a whole user-filled platform where you can tell more about your company, your product, share useful information, and build trust within your target audience. You can use your page to talk about new products and services, hold promotions, make special offers to your subscribers, organize giveaways, and more. Online tools can also increase your productivity and automate lots of routine tasks.
Where to Use Social Media Tools
Places to use social media tools for business are quite diverse — it all depends on your particular business needs and goals.
Let’s take a closer look at the most common ones.
Social media marketing tools
For startups which have pages in various social networks, it is always easier to have special social media marketing tools to optimize the work with content. Using online platforms, you can schedule your publications, share interesting articles connected with your topic, and reach more people to be turned into customers. Entrust your marketing campaign to the professional tool to make your advertising effective and visible.
Social media analysis tools
A detailed analysis of the data obtained from standard reports allows the evaluation and analysis of user actions carried out on your website.
Based on the data obtained, you can create personalized reports, implement traffic segmentation, and define further tasks for the entire working group. Social media analysis tools can generate personalized reports, track the traffic, collect data on the number of visitors, time spent in a certain section, the number of conversions, and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
Social media tracking tools
It’s good to use tracking tools in order to track the recognition of your brand, evaluate the success of your marketing campaign, and see the activity of users. Monitoring helps to understand how relevant your content is, the percentage of people who are interested in your products, as well as determine how many new users per day you can attract.
Newborn businesses have to pay special attention to the monitoring as it provides a better understanding of how to build marketing campaigns and how to reach the target audience.
Social media management tools
There are numerous free social media tools for small business to optimize your teamwork. You can divide tasks, keep a track on ongoing activities, schedule your publications, analyze your brand success among the target audience, and even attract new customers.
Do not underestimate social media automation tools because they can really help increase productivity, build trust in your brand, and improve customer support.
Social media posting tools
There are two types of services for automatic maintenance of profiles and groups in social networks. They can publish only the posts you have created, or search for the suitable content and post it at the right time.
Social media posting tools are a great choice if you already have content on your website or in the blog but you would like to extend the audience and duplicate some content in social networks as well. Another reason to use it is active online selling through different platforms.
Social media automation tools
Marketing automation is the latest trend among social media apps for small business. Using special social media automation tools, you can forget about routine tasks.
Certain tools can help you analyze the actions of your customers and make personalized proposals based on the data obtained. The main idea of marketing automation is to increase the productivity of your employees, letting them shift focus toward more important tasks.
Email marketing tools
Email marketing may seem very simple — adjust the newsletter, hit the send button, and track the engagement rates. However, you have to follow certain principles in order to reach your customers and attract new ones.
Must-have functions of social media tools
When choosing among the best social media management tools for small business, pay attention to these core features:
- Personalization of marketing approaches
- Automation of routine tasks like scheduling blog posts, newsletters, reports, and more
- Abilities for collecting customer data to understand the target audience better
- Abilities for simplifying communication between your business and customers
- Statistics and reports
Why and When Your Small Business Needs Social Media Tools
Are you still not sure whether your business needs social media tools? The answer is “yes” if you want to get new customers, increase profits, and stand out among the competitors. It is simple: your target audience is using social media, so you have to engage them with the help of usual instruments. It also gets easier to get feedback from your customers and improve your customer support.
Use online management tools to automate your business routine. Simply evaluate your regular workflow, and if there are monotonous tasks, try to find tools which can help optimize your working style in that particular aspect. Do not wait until the situation gets of control; integrate up-to-date solutions with your business model and enjoy the simplicity of management.
Tools for Social Media Evaluation Criteria
The evaluation criteria here depend on the category of tools, as you should assess the functionality in accordance with the tool’s aim. It means that you cannot apply the same criteria to the social media posting tools and social media monitoring tools.
Knowing the category, determine the specific features to evaluate: analytics, posting, sharing, targeting, SEO optimization, scalability, integration with other services, and more.
10 Best Social Media Tools for Small Business
What are the best social media tools for small businesses? Here are our top contenders:
Nimble
Nimble is among the high-efficiency CRM systems and suits the needs of small business well. You can use Nimble’s Smart Contacts app all over the web, as well as install a desktop/mobile version. It helps to build mutually beneficial customer relationships and maintain constant contact with your customers at any time. The functionality is useful for small businesses because it provides an opportunity to combine CRM with social networks.
Nimble starts at $19 per user/per month when paid annually. You can try Nimble free for 14 days.
Google Analytics
This is a free service designed to collect information on attendance, as well as on the actions of users on your website. The tool generates a set of reports, based on which, you can build and maintain your marketing strategy. In other words, installing a Google Analytics counter gives you an opportunity to understand who visited your website, when and why. A comprehensive analysis of the target audience allows you to quickly respond to user requests.
Bitly
Bitly is impossible to replace if you have to add web links into your commercial texts. This online tool shortens long web addresses (URL). The good thing about Bitly is that it provides in-depth analytics and allows tracking all your social media.
Social Mention
With Social Mention, you can track the popularity of your brand among Internet users. This online tool analyzes publications in different social media to find out what people say about your products, service, and brand. All you have to do is enter a search query in the appropriate field. The tool evaluates search results on the basis of different criteria. You can also see keywords and users, sources, and even related hashtags.
Refind
When you surf the Internet, you may find lots of useful links. Have you ever faced a problem of saving all these links? Refind is at your service. The tool saves all the links and helps to track them. Moreover, it can browse for you and suggest you the content you may find interesting. You can even connect with other users and explore the content trending in your business niche.
Rocketium
If your content consists mostly of photos and videos, you can turn them into captioned videos using Rocketium tool. You can switch between different orientation options (portrait, landscape or square) and the tool will automatically resize media files and subtitles. After selecting photos or videos and subtitles for each scene, click any of the templates – Rocketium will automatically adjust the frame and music.
Buffer
You will definitely love Buffer if you need to schedule posts on different social networks. You can choose the most suitable time for publications, in accordance with the timeframes, during which the customer activity is at its peak. Buffer also belongs to the social media sharing tools as it allows sharing any article with your subscribers with a simple click in your browser.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an online automation service that allows composing, sending, and analyzing mailout and advertising campaigns from both the PC version and the mobile application. First of all, the system is used for making email newsletters and their automation.
The service offers a list of management function. With its help, the administrator can monitor changes, search for subscribers by geolocation, and use filters by groups for quick searches.
LastPass
If you run an online shop, it is good to integrate LastPass with your website. The program allows not only saving passwords but also filling the customer data out of their profiles while making purchases.
Edocr
Edocr is all about easy sharing and SEO optimization. You can enjoy the full functionality of the digital publishing platform free-of-charge. Among the biggest benefits is the ability to generate leads and CRM integration. Edocr has an embeddable viewer to see how the written text will look on your website or blog.
How to Choose the Right Tool For Your Small Business
Understand the needs of using certain small business social media tools. Then, estimate the benefits you can get while using it. The golden rule is that the chosen solution should optimize business processes, be cost-efficient, and bring you new customers.
If your business is built on constant announcements and sharing information with your target audience, take a look at the social media scheduling tools. It will save you much time for other tasks and bring structure into your marketing strategy.
The next important feature is easy integration with other services and software which you may also use. Give preference to the tools which you can customize according to your business needs. Before choosing an online instrument, try to analyze your weak points and search for the features which can improve the situation.
Conclusion
Leading business in the modern world requires flexibility and trends’ acknowledgment. Today, the reality is so that your business should be presented extensively online to reach more customers and stand out among the competitors. There are numerous social media tools which can help your small business develop and run like a clockwork.
Explore the existing online tools for automation, management, marketing, posting; analyze all the pros and cons, and find the most beneficial solutions for your startup.
