Sunday, March 2, 2014

3 great websites that will save you time with social media marketing - By David Pride



The most popular excuse I hear from business owners as to why they don’t have an active social media presence is that “they don’t have time.” Employee drama, paying bills, and whatever else pops up seems to take precedent over posting anything to any social network. Below I have outlined three different tools that a business owner can use to save time with their social media marketing, and still be effective.

Hootsuite.com is a social media management dashboard that lets you manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ all from the same page and for free, the paid version is also very inexpensive coming in at $9.99/month. 

What is the advantage of using a tool like Hootsuite? The first advantage is that you have access to all your different newsfeeds on one site. You can see who’s tweeting about what in one category and who’s posting to Facebook on another. The value for your business in that is you can easily respond to and invite conversation from your social networks without having to log into each network individually. How many times have you decided to not check Twitter because, “I forgot the password?” Hootsuite also makes it so that you can post a universally appropriate message to go out on all your social networks at once. 

Feedly.com is a tool I use on a daily basis for finding content and staying up to date on information that is relevant to me. Feedly is also a great free tool. 

A common problem for small business owners is not having enough content to post to their networks that they feel their customers will be interested in. By using Feedly you can subscribe to the websites that you go to for information on your industry and add them to one great dashboard. Think of it as a website that only displays information that you are interested in. If you are an antique store you could design your Feedly so that it is subscribed to some of the really great antique websites that you visit. Instead of racking your brain for content ideas you can now go to one website that covers all the subjects you are interested in and odds are you will also be able to find an article or piece of information your online community will be interested in.

AdEspresso.com is one of my favorite Facebook advertising tools that takes the confusion and congestion out of the Facebook advertising platform. AdEspresso is designed with an easy process of connecting your Facebook business account and then it walks you through how to create an ad for your business.

AdEspresso also lets you create multiple ads so that you can test what images and texts work best and how communities react so you can make changes accordingly. Did I mention AdEspresso is free? This website even helps you decipher what results the ads lead to. Give this tool a shot and I think you will be happy that you did.

Every business owner is busy, but it is the ones who find tools that can help them reach their goals that will succeed. Give these suggestions a shot I would love to hear what you think.

David Pride is the owner of Social Impressions a strategic social media content creation agency. His agency crafts the social media voice of companies around New England.

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