Best Small Business Tools to Help Manage Your Social Media Channels

Did you know that there are over a BILLION websites on the Internet? Over 100,000 domain names are registered every 24 hours. With so much competition, how can you be assured your small business is making any online impact without sinking to the bottom? Here, we look at some popular tools to increase your social media presence while saving you time and increasing productivity.

BufferApp

Buffer is undoubtedly one of the best social media tools to help you grow your brand’s social media presence.  Bufferapp is a content management and publishing platform that allows you to distribute your content in an easy and efficient manner.  It allows automated scheduling of posts across social media sites; including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can even share posts via email using the Buffer app.

The app allows you to queue content to be released at a predetermined time, meaning you can schedule posts for weekends or after-hours, as well as those off hours that your target market happens to consume content. The app also comes with additional features such as analytics, which can be used to gauge the success of your marketing campaigns.  The analytics are centered around the content and engagement of your social media posts, as opposed to an all encompassing view of your social media channels (like Hootsuite, below)

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management tools. It is similar to Bufferapp, but differs in that it’s a full-service social media management tool rather than just a content publishing tool.  You can create keywords to follow, automate content across popular sites such as Facebook, Twitter and track conversations you are apart of.  The analytics are also centered around social media channel effectiveness, as opposed to just the effectiveness of individual posts.

What’s great is the user friendliness of Hootsuite, as it brings all the social media sites onto one centralized dashboard.  Hootsuite offers a limited free version with a trial option for the full package.  Multiple users can be created if your social media channels require a number of administrators.

Hootsuite has several more integrations than Bufferapp and supports several more social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, and more.  However, as a small business owner looking for basic social media management tools, you can’t go wrong with either option.

Kuku.io

Kuku.io is another social media management tool that you can use to schedule and distribute your content across your social media channels.  It’s easy to setup, integrates with most of the social networks, offers a pretty robust free tier, and allows you to build solid attribution analytics around your campaigns with it’s UTM parameters option.  UTM parameters are what allow you to clearly track how each campaign performed from a conversion and goal standpoint.  In our opinion, this is one of the key benefits of Kuku.io and is what differentiates itself from the competitors.

For only $10/month, you get all their features and unlimited posts and social media channel integrations.  The best features, including the UTM parameters and analytics tracking are only available with the paid account.

Hubspot

If you have it in the budget, a larger and more robust option for inbound marketing automation and social media management is Hubspot.  Hubspot is one of the larger marketing automation platforms and it offers SEO tools, Social Media Management, Email Automation for lead generation, Blog Hosting and more.

Although Hubspot does have a limited free version, the full package can be quite pricey for businesses that are tight on budget, with their lower tier at $200/month.  

Conclusion.

With over a billion users on Facebook alone, social media has become one of the greatest places to promote your small business.  Isn’t it time you got yourself a slice of the pie?