Many small businesses are not using social media to their advantage, at least according to a survey conducted last May by London-based Opinium Research. The firm conducted online interviews with 304 U.S. business owners and managers, with more than 200 of them founders of their companies. Each firm had fewer than 250 employees.
So why aren’t more small businesses engaging in social media? According to the survey, they don’t think it’s valuable to what they do and they don’t have the time. While relying on word-of-mouth and advertising works for some small businesses, others have found great success and increased revenue from incorporating social media into their marketing mix.
If you’re one of those small business owners who’s on the fence about the impact social media can have on your business, consider this: With more than 500 million users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. In September, Twitter, founded in 2006, announced that it had 100 million active users. That’s just for starters. There are other social networks, such as YouTube and LinkedIn that also have millions of users.
So as a small business owner, if you were to choose just two social networks, you will have increased your brand awareness greatly and exposed your products and services to new potential customers in the process. But that still leaves the issue of time. Updating your social networks and engaging your followers, fans and peers can seem like a full-time job. But it doesn’t have to be. BizBytes found five free social media marketing tools that can save you time and money as you grow your presence on social networks.
1. Polly.IM: This free tool monitors Twitter to find out what people are saying about your brand. When you’re notified that someone is talking about your business on Twitter, the tool suggests your responses and will send messages to customers on your behalf. http://polly.im/
2. Timely.is. With Timely.is, you can find out the times during the day when people most often read your post. To save you time, this tool gives you the ability to write your tweets in advance and have them go live during those times. http://timely.is/#/
3. Roost: For the busy small business owner, this free tool is a must-have. Roost allows you to create a single post and send it to your Facebook and Twitter pages at once. You can pick the date and time you want your posts to go out. Roost also makes content suggestions to help you maximize the impact of your message. http://www.roost.com/
4. OnlyWire: OnlyWire offers a free service that will send it to more than 40 social networks at once including Yelp and LinkedIn. With the free account, you can send up to 300 posts a month. For as little as $10 a month, you can send more if you need to. This tool is used by major brands, including Time Warner, GE and Cisco. http://onlywire.com/
5. CrowdBooster. When you use social media to market your product or service, you want to know that it’s working. CrowdBooster is a free tool that analyzes your social media campaigns on Facebook and Twitter and shows you what’s working and what isn’t. It’s used by major brands like Ben & Jerry’s and JetBlue. www.crowdbooster.com.
For more free time-saving social media marketing tools, log on to www.BizBytes101.com
