By Tasha Cunningham
Overwhelmed by the prospect of managing content on multiple social media networks at once? You’re not alone. While monitoring and managing content on social networks can be time-consuming, it is highly beneficial to your bottom line and can help you gain an edge on your competition. In fact, a study, released by Digimind, a Massachusetts-based provider of research on Internet trends, found that almost eight out of ten companies large and small, or 79.2 percent, use social media sites to monitor information about their competitors.
So how can an overwhelmed small business owner make managing social media easier? BizBytes found 5 low-cost tools to help.
Crowd Booster: This tool is free for managing one Twitter and one Facebook account. Prices vary from $39 to $99 a month to manage up to 30 social media accounts. This tool tells you when to schedule your tweets and Facebook updates, offers insight into what you can do to make your social media tools perform better and gives you real-time analytics. www.crowdbooster.com.
Postling: More than 20,000 small businesses are using this tool. While it’s not free, it costs just a $1 to try it for 30 days and just $5 a month after that. With this tool, you can manage all your social networks in one place, monitor mentions of your brand online and receive daily e-mail updates to help you analyze what’s working and what needs improvement in your social media strategy. Get it here – www.postling.com.
HootSuite: This tool has been mentioned in previous BizBytes columns. This free tool is being used by major brands like Pepsi, McDonalds and the Sony Music to manage their social networks. With this tool, you can schedule your social media updates, find out who’s talking about your brand online and filter information by keyword, hashtag or geo-location. www.HootSuite.com
Seesmic: This free tool is still in beta. With it, you can manage your social networks anywhere from any mobile device while you’re on the go. There is a desktop application as well to help you manage your networks. You can post to and manage an unlimited number of social media accounts. Get it here – www.seesmic.com.
NutShellMail: This free tool from Constant Contact helps you manage your social media accounts. It’s essentially an aggregation tool, more than a management tool. It takes all of the updates made about your brand on these networks and creates a snapshot for you. Then, the snapshot is e-mailed to you at a particular time that you select. While it’s not complete social media management, it can give you valuable information. Get it here – www.nutshellmail.com.
Bonus: Here are two mroe tools that can help you, but are pricier.
SproutSocial – this tool only supports Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but with plans ranging from $9 – $899 a month, it may be worth looking into depending on the number of social networks you’re managing for your small business – http://www.sproutsocial.com
Raven Tools – this tool has plans that start at $99 a month and up. You can manage multiple social networks and schedule your updates. http://raventools.com
Want more social media management tips? Check out www.Biz Bytes101.com!