News & Insight
Four Free Social Media Tools To Help Your Small Business
Posted on: Thursday, November 24, 2011
By: Alex Tucker
I'm a firm believer that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And one of the big challenges in social media (especially for the early adopters) over the last few years has been exactly how do you measure social media success.
Global enterprises have the luxury of lead nurturing and management tools like Marketo and Act-on to support their efforts, but what can the SME Business owner do short of investing £20k in software?
Well here are a few free tools.
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Klout. Klout not only uses algorithms to measure your influence, true reach, amplification, and network size across multiple social media accounts, but also allows you to compare your performance to your competitors accounts. Sign up for free at www.klout.com
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Crowdbooster. Free while it's still in Beta (there will probably be a small fee introduced later), Crowdbooster sends you a weekly summary that shows you your highest performing tweets for both network reach and sharing and suggests the optimum time to post important tweets for maximum results. Check out www.crowdbooster.com
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Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a handy aggregator that lets you view stream across Twitter lists, Facebook friends and your LinkedIn network. You can also schedule posts for later and get useful insight on twitter accounts you interact with. There are great free apps for iPhone and Android. (see also tweetdeck and others that provide the same free service - Hootsuite is my favourite). If you're a chrome user, the "hootlet" browser extension is extremely useful for sharing any page as you browse.
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Friend or Follow. Now, I disapprove of the practice of following/unfollowing people based on their following you (or not). But friend or follow has helped me to focus at times on improving the content of my tweets and the way in which I engage potential new contacts to increase the chances of attracting followers and building interaction on twitter. I've also found interesting followers i didn't realize i had and followed them back via www.friendorfollow.com - use it responsibly.
Finally, be cautious of any tool, site, or twitter user who says they can build your Twitter or Facebook following overnight or promises to make you rich using social media - they are junk at best. What it takes is a good plan, great content, careful measurement, and continuous improvement.
Filed under: Social, Web, Media
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