Fab Five: 5 Fantastic Social Media Tools for Growing Your Business

Discover some of the best social media tools for small business — helping you amp up customer engagement without breaking the bank.

Social media has matured to the point that it’s mission critical for marketing, PR and customer engagement. The hard part these days is deciding which tools you should use to support your strategy.

For smaller businesses without access to proprietary tools or the assistance of a digital agency, working out the most cost-effective tools can be a complicated and lengthy process. To help you out, I’ve distilled what I know about the social software industry and picked a selection of the best on the market.

Choosing Your Style

The most important step in the selection process is to define exactly what kind of social media software you need. This will be defined by the kind of social media activity you want to engage in.

One of the challenges of being a small business is that the tried and tested tools can be outside of your budget. It’s hard to select quality from the mass of free and low-budget alternatives, but thinking about which core category you fall into will help you discern the most suitable software.

5 Social Media Tools that Fit Your Needs

1) Social Media Conversation Tools: ViralHeat

For example, if your business is planning to use Facebook and Twitter as customer service channels, then you should focus on Social Media Conversation tools (also known as Social Engagement tools) like ViralHeat, which boasts a fairly sophisticated service from $49.99. This tool, which is something of an all-rounder, covers the full gamut of social media sites and allows you to manage up to 15 different accounts from a single place. This is great if you have customer service channels for different products.

2) Social Marketing Software: HootSuite Pro

On the other hand, businesses that produce a wealth of content will find that Social Marketing software such as HootSuite Pro addresses their need to manage those creative assets effectively. Second only to Google Analytics as the most popular social media tool, HootSuite allows you to manage a range of profiles from a single interface. Its strength is that it allows you to execute and measure social media marketing campaigns without escalating costs. Whether you use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or all of them at once, you can use HootSuite to post messages and measure results. HootSuite packages start at a modest $8.99, but advanced analytics come at an elevated cost.

3) Social Listening Software: Sprout Social

For some, social media activity will be less closely tied to their core business. If you’re taking a more PR-based approach and want to know what’s being said about your company online, then Social Listening software is the category for you. Sprout Social is a good example of a toll which allows you to monitor your brand terms on Twitter and Facebook for under $100 a month. While it doesn’t currently support other social media channels, it does offer a web alert feature which you can use to manage your brand reach on blogs, news sites and other content sources. It’s great for measuring the impact of your social PR – not so great if your main channels are Google+ or LinkedIn.

Social engagement favourite ViralHeat is also good as a listening tool, since it not only provides data on brand terms and products, but allows you to visualise the data too. That said, if you’re looking for strong customer service or need to be able to filter your data by demographic, you may be disappointed.

4) Social Influencer Software: BuzzStream

Alternatively, if you’re more interested in identifying people with an interest in your key topics, then Social Influencer software will be most helpful. BuzzStream helps you establish and manage your relationships with social influencers for as little as $29 per/month. The tool has two streams: PR & Social Media contact management and Link Building contact management. It allows you to keep a record of all your social media contacts, prioritise them according to sales relevance and develop meaningful communication with them. The downside is that it works best on single-campaign initiatives.

5) Analytics Tools: Google Analytics

Finally, for those whose social media strategy is already up and running but need to measure its business impact, Analytics tools give you an overview of how and where you are performing. Google Analytics is by far the leading choice in this area – in fact, the chances are you’re already using it. As far as free social media tools go, it’s by far the most comprehensive free tool on the market and is used by start-ups and industry behemoths alike. The advantages are that it’s free, easy to use and based on Google’s familiar-yet-cutting-edge technology. It’s seamless to integrate into pretty much everything else you do.

Through Google Analytics you can track web page views, visitor information, and conversion rates. You can also set goals and parameters that help you understand your audience. For example, you can split your conversion data by demographic. There is also functionality to help you measure revenue per click, ROI and profit margin. While the tool does have its limitations such as the poor range of supported currencies and limits on requests, these are only problematic for international businesses. Smaller businesses should note that historical data is kept for a maximum of 25 months, meaning you’ll have to explore other storage avenues for long-term analysis. 

What other social media tools have you had success with? Share your picks in the comments below.

Photo by: mkhmarketing