Social media is now a requirement for businesses and as the demand for it grows, so does the cost. So how are small business supposed to keep up with the cost, the technology, and all of the never-ending changes that happens in social media while keeping up with their actual business?
Fortunately, there are tools for all sorts of things. The list below is full of tools that can help with most of your small business needs.
Socedo
Targeted lead generation is often overlooked in social media, especially in small businesses. The accepted truth among many people and companies is that social media does not convert. This is simply not true. Socedo (a social media lead generation tool) aims to fix that. Socedo offers several packages for business owners that start at $300 per month. Their packages include daily prospects, enhanced search features, keyword and industry targeting, and they will deliver 50+ email addresses to you each month. This is an excellent and affordable way for businesses to keep up the competition without breaking the bank.
You can Socedo can search for leads by Twitter bio information, tweets, interest, and location. For many businesses finding new leads is exhausting, especially if you’re operating a B2B business. They will also follow people for you, send them auto messages and give you a full report of every action and lead you received through their service.
Photo credit: Socedo.com
Cyfe
Analytics are one of the most important things needed for a social media campaign’s success. The trouble is that a lot of times the analytics are difficult to read and understand, or they are in so many places that it becomes difficult to know where to look or where to find the time to. Cyfe offers a wonderful solution to these problems by offering a single place to hold your entire social, advertising and website analytics in one place. Using their service you can create several dashboards, cross check analytics, and pull your historical data easily. They will event allow you to share your data publicly with custom domains, which is great for freelancers who need to get reporting to their clients.
Photo credit: Cyfe.com
Social media can be scary and working with a professional can be even scarier. It is hard to know if you are getting a bang for your buck, and that the work is quality. Most business owners are not social media specialists, and that is okay. Instead of trying to manage it all yourself, try to focus on using social media solutions that fit your budget, and schedule. At the end of the day your business is what has to come first. If you are wasting time using social media incorrectly, then it is no longer an asset to your business, and instead is a huge waste of time and money.
99 Dollar Social
Quality and Affordable are two things that we have tricked ourselves into believing are impossible to find together. If something is affordable we assume that is must be second rate. When we work with quality products or services we assume that they must also be expense. $99 Social is a social media management company that has proved us to be incorrect! They offer individualized content creation, daily posting, social profile optimization, and more all of $99 per month. The best part is that they also include unlimited email, phone and chat support. This is a great solution for businesses seeking active social media accounts at an affordable price.
Personapp
Larger companies spend thousands of dollars a year coming up with their buyer personas. They create a visualization of their consumers so that they can find better ways to connect with them and convert them. Personapp allows you to create several buyer personas for free that you can export to PDF and or share digitally with your teams.
Photo credit: Personapp.io
Topsy
Everyone in marketing will tell you that time has a lot to do with the success of your social media content, but not many people know where to look for timely and industry specific content in various forms at once. Topsy is an excellent solution for finding relevant and trending content to share on social media. It even allows you to sort through content by links, tweets, photos, and videos. If you are looking to start conversation with the people who influence those topics to tag or ask for a quote, it allows you to do that too. The best part is that it is free!