“Build a good business, and success will follow.” – Were you thinking THIS?
Stop, because this is 2015, and this notion isn’t going to take you anywhere.
Obscurity has to be warded off with some great, robust marketing strategies, often with a business website pushed toward visibility via Search Engine Optimisation.
Now, did you know that Social Media is in the mainstream? Every search marketer is feeding on it to invite quality traffic on websites.
But, what about those small business that fail to gather a high fidelity marketing team? How would they carry out promotional tasks in simple, inexpensive ways? How would they popularise merchandise and services? And make their lead generation strategies bear fruit?
The good news is, the Internet is overflowing with plenty of social management tools. So, betraying all the complexities of the process, here are some must-have tools you should consider if you are at the helm of a shoestring-budget trade:
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite is filthy famous as the ultimate social media management tool for brand management. It surfaced in the year 2008 and has since then, become an integral part of every social media marketer.
What makes it popular is its UI, which supports a host of social media platforms, ranging from Twitter, to Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, Mixi and TrendSpottr. Also, when additional integrations are enabled, Hootsuite supports Instagram, MailChimp, Storify, Reddit, Vimeo, Tumblr and YouTube, too!
- Nimble
Nimble is crowned as the #1 CRM by Software Excellence Award, Nimble is a novel and powerful web-based program armored with engagement tools, social listening, and mobile app.
“Nimble is a relationship platform powered by context. We are laser-focused on helping you surface information that matters to your business,” speaks the website.
The software has some amazing features like contact management, contact insights, social listening, unified keys, and activity management – all important for business needs.
- Discover.ly
Discover.ly says, “Put social to work.” It lets a user view the social sites associated with his email connections and even cross-refers other such sites as he browses through. For instance, if he is online on LinkedIn and viewing someone’s profile, Discover.ly will let him view the mutual connection with this person on other platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
This feature is of great use in business because it lets a user connect to different people via mutual connections and references.
- Mention
Mention is like Google Alerts; only, better. It will crawl the web in search of key terms, competitors and content. The software also ransacks social media networks for fed key terms and comes up with real-time results.
How is Mention useful for business? Well, it alerts trade owners and local search marketers whenever their keywords or key phrases of interest are mentioned. A subsequent conversation is then encouraged amongst social media managers, which is like a silent promotion of your brand.
- Studio
Studio is a designing app especially meant for photo-based social networking. In many ways, it complements Instagram. With this app, you can add text-based designs to your photos. Another amazing feature is that it lets you take someone else’s deigns and creations and mix it onto your own photos.
“What Instagram did for photography, this app will do for design.” – Mashable.
While most social networks are concerned with only consumption, Studio is a breather, for it focuses on creation and offers basic tools that let users come up with wonderful, layered designs. So, if you are running a photography business or looking stand among the huge crowd as a brand then I am sure you will not like to miss this social management tool.
- Viraltag
Another amazing tool for marketing visual content is Viraltag. It’s a time saver and allows traffic to flow in from multiple social rostrums in such one click.
“Increase user engagement by publishing engaging visual content to your social networks, content networks and blogs,” says the platform.
What makes the software stand out from the crowd is its unique feature of enabling Pin scheduling on Pinterest. Because pinning photos is one of the most effective marketing trends of today, Viraltag has shown us a very easy and effortless way of visual content marketing.
- Zoho SalesIQ
Zoho SalesIQ is a platform that tracks website visitors and lets you connect and interact with them in real time. It is bundled with some interesting features like an inbound and outbound language translator, intelligent triggers to group visitors based on the amount of time they spend on a website, or on what pages they visit, or even whether they are return visitors.
“Convert Your Website Visitors into Customers,” says the platform.
The website has a very user-friendly interface and makes interaction simple and less time-consuming.
- ManageFlitter
Steam Feed recently mentioned about the tool, “If you want your team to work faster and smarter on your business’s Twitter strategy, you really should be using ManageFlitter.”
This platform has more than 2.6 million users worldwide, most of which include the big players like GE, American Express, PayPal, Richard Branson and other mighty brands.
ManageFlitter is popular because of its unique features, which allow users to manage multiple social accounts. Time zones are a ‘no-restriction.’ The platform also has a feature called ‘PowerPost,’ which lets you schedule tweets as per your preference of timing.
- Tailwind
Tailwind is backing a noble cause. It believes, Pinterest and Instagram should go hand-in-hand. And so, it is beta-testing a feature using which, users will be able to pin Instagram pictures on Pinterest boards.
Social media and content strategist, and the winner of the Best Australian Business Blog 2014. Donna Moritz speaks about Tailwind, “I am LOVING Tailwind right now for the simple reason that it shaves hours off my time when it comes to Pinterest marketing.”
The feature will also allow you to sort photos on Instagram by likes, comments and recent posts. You can schedule pins and repins, pin content from other websites using the Tailwind hover button, view analytics to see how your profile is performing, schedule reminders, and even find pin suggestions! Great, no?
- Compfight
Do you crave for royalty-free images sometimes? Say you’re marketing content. Do you, then, wish you had access to some free images? Well, if you are running a tight-budget business, you will.
Now, here’s Compfight to help you out. It is an amazing tool that assists you in discovering royalty-free images. It behaves like Google Images, only, to push its functionality in search of free images.
How does it do the miracle? Well, it ransacks Flickr to bring to you high-resolution images that have Creative Commons License. Of course, you need to credit the owner. So, Compfight also credits the source of the image by providing the HTML code for it.
- Picreel
A great flow of traffic into websites does not necessarily mean that there’s conversion every time. Bounce Rate is something which makes every website worry. According to a report by the Bounce Exchange, “almost 96% of visitors never return.”
To save you from the bouncing horror, here’s Picreel, which lets you optimise your website and attract visitors who are potential customers.
Picreel’s going to take the market, undoubtedly.
- Atomic App
This app is perhaps on its way to become the best Social Media Management tool in 2015! Why? – Because it focuses on ‘CONTENT,’ and how to make it better. Its way of action is very, very unique.
The Atomic App studies the emotional appeal of your title, looks for grammatical errors and analyses whether the content is fit for your target audience. Based on this assessment, the app scores a content from 1 to 100.
Content is still the king of brand marketing. So, in many ways, the Atomic App is going to be of big help.
#13: Portent Idea Generator
Suffering from writer’s block? Suffer no more because Portent Idea Generator is here!
This is yet another amazing app for all the content evangelists out there. It helps you generate unique headlines whenever you feed it with a topic. Choose the best and start writing instantly. Simple!
Of course, the tools are many, because ‘being social’ is running deep and incessantly in the veins of every business marketing strategist. What’s your pick this year?
