Free Social Media Tools for Small Business

Photo Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lorenjavier/4298782039/

One of the beauties of Social Media is that even a lemonade stand can manage a great social media presence while running a tight ship financially. I recently had the pleasure of writing a guest blogging for Roundpeg, a full service marketing firm serving the Indianapolis small business community. In that blog I laid out a free social media start up kit for small businesses (read it here). This blog expands on the idea of “Inspecting What You Expect” through social media measurement tools. you will find free social media tools broken up into four categories (Monitoring, Content Management, Diagnostic, and ROI). Read it, then add your own contribution to the comments section. Enjoy!

Monitoring

• Use Google Alerts and Google Desktop with RSS Feeds to keep an eye on your small business name, brand name(s), and any keywords or news topics that are important to you.
• Set up alerts on Twilert.com
• Regularly search on the following: Search.twitter.com, OpenBook, Socialmention, Google.com

Content Management

• Sign up for the free versions of HootSuite and CoTweet.
• Create a content calendar segmented by topics, write your content in advance, and use the scheduling features of HootSuite  or CoTweet to release it over time.
• When you share a link, shrink it with bit.ly or the built-in shrinking tool in HooteSuite

Diagnostic

• Create a wordcloud at Wordle. It is a quick way to ensure that your conversations are keeping in line with your SEO initiatives.
• Pull a report on your twitter account regularly from Tweetstats.com and compare the results.

Return On Investment (ROI)

• Use unique links when sharing in social media channels and measure traffic/sales. If you are meeting face to face, ask how they found you. Bit.ly and HootSuite have decent stats on click-through. This information will help you tweak your content to what your audience actually wants to read.
• Keep an eye on your Klout score, and follow the suggestions it gives you, but don’t treat it as the gospel.

Keep your eyes on the prize as you grow and remember, the more data you gather, the easier it will be for you to tweak your social media presence and make it more effective at driving your small business bottom line.

Remember to add your own links to the comment section.

Be awesome,
Muhammad Yasin