If you're a small business taking the plunge into the teeming waters of social media, you're going to want to know about the various tools and services that help your brand manage its social media initiatives. Luckily there is a wealth of tools already available, many at low cost, as well as many more useful applications launching almost every day.
These tools can help you stay on top of your brand's presence in social media, giving you insight into how effective your campaign is and what strategies are working best for your company.
CoTweet and HootSuite
If your small business has a presence on Twitter, you'll want to look into two great and free tools for managing your account: CoTweet and HootSuite. You can think of them essentially as Customer Relationship Management tools for Twitter.
Both services offer a similar core functionality, allowing you to manage multiple individual accounts, give multiple authors access to individual Twitter accounts, search for keywords and monitor saved searches over time, and get message notifications based on certain criteria. Beyond that, each service has its own custom features -- and which app is right for your business will depend on who in your organization needs to use it and what functions you need to access in your business.
Other Twitter Tools
There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of third-party Twitter applications available that could benefit your small business. Because Twitter provides an open Application Programming Interface, or API, outside developers are able to build services on top of Twitter. These tools can help you do a number of useful things including measuring your influence on Twitter, getting various statistics, getting alerts based on messages from particular users or matching certain search terms, integrating with productivity software, and more.
You can also get great access to Twitter from your mobile device. There are relatively full-featured Twitter clients available for every smartphone platform, and even non-smartphone mobiles can interface with Twitter via SMS or the mobile web. You'll want to do some research to find out which mobile client is right for you, as well as which third-party tools are going to be most valuable for your business.
Facebook Tools
Increasingly, you'll want to make sure your business has a presence on Facebook -- the global social network that recently passed 350 million users. Check out some resources to help you optimize your brand's presence, along with some helpful applications and case studies of businesses on Facebook.
There's no "one size fits all" solution to leveraging Facebook for your small business, but a good rule of thumb is to start small and keep an eye on what's working. Your Facebook Page is a great way to interact directly with your customers and potential customers in a way that's engaging and personal. Keep your customers up to date on what's going on with your company, interesting developments they might want to know about, special offers and sales, and perhaps showcase a bit of your company's personality and values.
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is quickly emerging as one of the premier online destinations for finding, making, and maintaining new business contacts as well as a great platform for engaging in forum-style conversations. Via LinkedIn Groups you can connect with like-minded individuals in your industry, engage in valuable discussion, and generate new leads for business opportunities, potential partnerships, and of course new talent to build your staff and grow your business.
With LinkedIn's new faceted search feature, you have a wealth of very specific business and personnel knowledge at your fingertips as well. Setting up complex and refined search queries is very easy and intuitive to do, and can lead to a host of valuable and timely information in your business's niche.
Yelp
Another great service worth paying attention to for the small business is Yelp -- particularly for local businesses and businesses with a physical storefront. You can create your own listing on Yelp with all the information potential customers need to find you, and your existing customers can rate and leave feedback on their experience with you.
Generating consistently high ratings and positive comments from your customers can make all the difference in the world when a potential customer needs a service you provide. If they compare your business to your competitors and find you have higher ratings and more positive interactions, they'll be far more likely to choose you over your competitor for their next service provider.
Now that Yelp has added check-ins from its iPhone application, the site is positioned very well to leverage the emerging space of mobile location-based services, including Foursquare, Loopt, and Gowalla. This space will be huge for the small local business in the coming years, and now is a great time to get familiar with the emerging landscape.
Your Blog
It almost goes without saying these days, but one of the old social media standbys is still one of the best for connecting directly with your audience and potential audience. Your blog is a great tool for getting longer-form information out about your company, new products and services, any special events, contests or offerings you might have. It plays nice with many of the other tools listed in this article too, as one central blog post can then be distributed to your business's other networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for maximum exposure.
Your company blog is also another great way to put a human face on your business -- a valuable commodity in a post-industrial corporate landscape where consumers feel like many companies are anonymous and hard to reach. You can showcase what's interesting and relevant about your company beyond "just the facts" of your services, products, and prices. It's a chance for your small business's personality and values to shine through in a forum that's public and accessible to your existing customers and to the new customers you hope to bring on.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock
