Thanks to the internet-focused age we live in, small business owners have been slowly making the switch from time consuming, costly outbound marketing to effective, efficient inbound marketing. The new focus on inbound marketing has allowed small businesses to get found by the customers who need them and ultimately get more clients, without trying to outspend the competition.
As a small business owner, you can market your small business using social media marketing by making effective use of free online tools. These tools allow you to interact with your prospects on your social media networks and check to see how many of them share or retweet the information you provide to them. A few of the free tools also offer reports that let you know if your social media efforts have had an impact on your clients.
To effectively market your business, you need to be active online and in social media. But just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account is not enough anymore. To reach more people and get more clients you need to make sure you are getting a return out of the time and work you are putting into your social media networking. Is it truly growing your online footprint?
For better management of your social media accounts, here are two social media marketing tools that help you manage all of your accounts in one place and provide some free reporting tools:
Hootsuite is a social media client (still known as Twitter clients, but do so much more) that allows you to build custom social analytics reports, update multiple networks in one step including, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook (profiles and pages) and Foursquare, compose and converse on the go with mobile apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry; track results review success with click-through analytics in real-time; manage multiple contributors with team collaboration, share data and access without sharing your passwords; optimize delivery by choosing the best time and date to deliver your message to your audience. Hootsuite allows you to schedule messages in bulk and have your posts made when it makes the most sense for your business.
TweetDeck is another client that is has a very similar function as Hootsuite. It boils down to your preference and which one provides the simplest user experience for you. Just now that once you begin to market you small business using social media marketing, having a tool that monitors, tracks and allows you to see what is working best for your business, is a must.
To read more about what each social media client has to offer check out TweetDeck VS HootSuite: The “Twitter Client” Showdown.