Social marketing strategies are important for every business. As an entrepreneur, you need to constantly evaluate what tools you’re using and how effective they really are for obtaining your goals. That includes your social media tools. You also should always be on the lookout for new tools that will make you more efficient. Using the right tools will help you move your business to the next level. It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting to draw out your business plan or if you’re wildly successful, there’s always room for improvement.
As an entrepreneur today, your toolbox should have a good percentage of tools that will help you leverage the power of the internet and social media. Why? How about this – people following you on Twitter are almost 80% more likely to purchase from you than your competitors! Ok, so you know you need solid social media strategies. But what? How do you find out what’s going on in your industry and what’s popular right this second? How do you know what your customers or potential client base is talking about? How can you keep business projects straight when your team is spread around the country or the globe? There are ways to do all of these things, and many of them are within everyone’s price range – free!
What’s the Scoop on You?
Do you know what people are saying about you? Do you know if you’re being talked about at all? There are many ways you can keep up with what’s being said about you across the internet. If they’re talking about you on social media, blogs, or Twitter, you can eavesdrop! Here are a few free tools that you can use to get the scoop on you.
- Social Mention
Social Mention is a free social media search engine that gathers information from all over the web. You can find out what’s being said about you on over 100 social media sites all at once. Some of the places it will dig around in are Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. You can also set up alerts so whenever someone mentions you, you’ll instantly be notified. - Board Tracker
Forums are a gold mine for information and interaction. Board Tracker watches thousands of forums and can notify you anytime someone makes a new post or a new thread mentioning you (or whatever search term you want to monitor).
Twitter Tools
You set up your Twitter accounts. Now what? There are several amazing Twitter tools that cost absolutely nothing. Put your Twitter game on steroids and leverage its power to boost your business by learning how to use these in your day-to-day management.
Simple
Twitter search will let you search for any keyword. It’s like Google for Twitter. Very simple. Very quick. You can also search for your company to see what people are saying about you and your business.
Get Local
Monitter is a Twitter search tool that lets you target a specific location. You can select to search for tweets coming from within 10 to 100 miles of whatever area you choose. Select up to three keywords you’d like to search for and watch it fetch results in real time.
The Big Kahuna
The big daddy of the search tools you can use to keep an eye out for anyone talking about you or your businesss is Trackur. Trackur will let you search across social media, get email or RSS alerts on what you’re monitoring, save items, and use custom filters to drill down and find the exact information you’re looking for.
Other Awesome Free Goodies
MailChimp
You hired a kick-ass web designer. They understood your goals and designed your site to lead potential customers to your lead capture. You did your homework and brought in an SEO superstar who was able to get traffic flowing to your site. So now what? What are you doing with all those leads? Part of your social media strategies need to include the post-capture, too. The longer they sit and don’t hear from you, the further you get from their minds. You have to keep your name, your image, your product fresh in their mind.
Contrary to what some will say, mailing lists are still very effective. MailChimp is a web-based mailing list manager that gives you custom HTML templates and lets you track and analyze your email campaigns. It’s extremely versatile, in that you can upgrade and integrate it with your WordPress site, Twitter, and more. You can get all the basic features completely free for up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails each month. They even have free training available via online webinars that you can sign up for! Not enough? How about getting High Impact Email 5 free? MailChimp and Template Zone partnered together and now you can get HIE5 fully integrated into your MailChimp for free.
Why am I mentioning an email manager other than the fact that it’s a necessity for any business? It’s more than just a mailing list manager… it’s social! With MailChimp, you can share your campaign across multiple social networking sites. You can auto-tweet that the newest addition to your newsletter is out. You can even watch how successful your campaign is by seeing how many times it’s been retweeted and who retweeted it. Dress up your emails with your Twitter background and show recent tweets right in the email or let your customers share your email campaign across social networks they’re active in! No hands down, MailChimp is more of a powerful marketing pimp than a chimp!
Remember the Milk
Managing your business online and staying on top of the social media game requires a well-planned strategy and daily work. Remember the Milk is an online time management tool that will help you keep everything in check. Manage daily tasks, set reminders, or share reminders. Send reminders to your team for things that need to be done and even access it from your phone.