3 Top Social Media Tools for Small Businesses

Posted by: Jen Robinson

I recently read a great article on Mashable, 5 Superior Social Media Management Tools, that introduced me to a few new social media tools that I hadn't been aware of. To name a few (that you may want to check out!): SpredFast, a social media management tool with a big emphasis on analytics, Engage121, an integrated social media monitoring and engagement application and CoTweet, a comprehensive Web-based social media engagement, management and reporting solution. The social media landscape changes quickly and new tools become available almost every day, making it hard to keep track of it all! So, after catching up on the new, hottest tools with Mashable's article, I was inspired share my own list to that goes beyond the obvious Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn suggestions:

3 Top Social Media Tools for Small Businesses:

1. TweetDeck - A social media browser that helps you stay in touch with what's happening now and allows you to connect with contacts from Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn and more. TweetDeck is very intuitive and provides users with an organized way to manage multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts and LinkedIn accounts. This is especially helpful for small businesses that run more than one Twitter account, or users that run a corporate account and a personal account (like me). You can even schedule Tweets to keep your followers engaged if you are away from the computer for an extended period of time. TweetDeck is available for your Desktop, iPhone, iPad or Android. I can personally vouch for the Desktop and Android applications. Without them, I would be completely lost!
2. MailChimp - Email, you say? Isn't that becoming obsolete? Not according to some recent studies. Email is still a great way to keep your business in front of current customers or prospects, and these days, the more data you receive about your email campaigns, the more successful and email-savvy you can become. MailChimp not only offers basic mailing list management, but also has email tracking and campaign analysis, easy HTML templates and for those that use their free account, up to 3,000 emails per month. If you need additional functionality, they do offer a tiered pricing system. MailChimp also integrates with Twitter, Salesforce and WordPress (to name a few), allowing you to integrate your email campaigns with your every day social media processes.
3. Blogspot.com - Blogspot is a long-standing favorite of mine. For entrepreneurs or small businesses that don't have the resources to support a blog within their company website, Blogspot provides an easy, professional and free way to begin sharing information with customers, prospects and anyone else who might be interested in what you have to say. You can go completely custom with your layout and design (for creative folks!) or take the quicker route and use one of the many available blog templates. Once your blog is live, you can choose from thousands of widgets to add to your blog (visitor counters, Twitter feeds, photo albums, RSS feeds and more). Blogspot makes it simple to see who follows your blog and to also communicate with those followers. For an added punch, you can easily set up a Google Analytics account (for free) and sync it with your blog to begin getting some real data to measure your blog's success.

All three of these tools will help any small business owner enhance productivity, streamline their social media activities and learn how to measure their social media success, so be sure to check them out!