11 Social Media Marketing Solutions for Small Businesses Social media marketing is an art form, and with the right social media marketing solution, business owners can master it. Although social media platforms offer their own marketing tools — Twitter targeted ads, Facebook Pages, Google+ Local and Pinterest Promoted Pins, to name a few — social media marketing solutions streamline the process while helping businesses avoid alienating followers. Constantly pushing advertisements and sales copies no longer works on todays increasingly social-media-savvy consumers, which means businesses need to take on a more strategic, relationship-building approach. Here are 10 social media marketing solutions to help you get there. 1. livecube — Social media engagement for live events Hashtags arent always the best solution to maximizing social media engagement during live events. livecube takes the inherent problems with hashtags — misspellings, lack of participation and clunkiness of revisiting tweets — and uses gamification to incentivize and reward participation. It not only provides attendees with a centralized place to find event-related tweets, ideas and connections, but also encourages participation by rewarding users with points, badges and real-life prizes for contributing to discussions. Other features include event management tools that integrate social media, such as speaker scheduling, logistics management, analytics and social networking. 2. HootSuite — Campaign management and analytics HootSuite is a social media management dashboard that helps businesses simplify and automate social media marketing campaigns. With HootSuite, users can manage multiple social networks, schedule messages and tweets, analyze social media traffic, track conversions, and measure campaign results — all in one user-friendly dashboard. HootSuites Social Analytics feature also offers more than 30 report modules — such as Facebook Insights and Google Analytics — to track metrics like top content, likes and shares, follower demographics, traffic sources and more. These features help businesses easily measure reach, increase engagement and maximize visibility across all types of social channels. HootSuite supports a wide range of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Tumblr and Flickr. Free HootSuite accounts offer limited features, and paid business packages start at $8.99 per month. A 30-day free trial is also available. 3. Offerpop — Ad-based social media marketing Offerpop is the solution for businesses interested in launching paid advertisement-based social media marketing campaigns. Offerpop works by creating social layers that weave social media into different forms of advertising. Using Offerpop, businesses can turn email marketing — as well as paid Web, broadcast and print advertisements — into powerful social media marketing tools. Offerpop uses these nonsocial advertising platforms to increase engagement via hashtag campaigns, contests and promotions on social media channels. Businesses will also gain access to valuable social data — such as email addresses, influence, loyalty and interests — to optimize campaigns, grow followers and, ultimately, increase revenue. Offerpop requires either an annual subscription or per-campaign plan for businesses with more than 100 followers. Annual subscriptions start at $14 per month, and campaign plans start at $20 per campaign. A 14-day campaign trial is available. 4. LeadSift — Social media lead generation Each social media platform offers a treasure trove of potential clients and customers. LeadSift takes the guesswork out of finding them and uncovers a world of social media marketing opportunities. LeadSift mines millions of social media conversations, cutting through the noise to deliver relevant, quality leads based on metrics set by users, such as geographic information and keywords. For instance, if you own a flower shop in San Francisco, LeadSifts algorithms will find tweets from users located in San Francisco who are looking to buy flowers, as opposed to just tweeting about flowers in general. You can then initiate engagement, target campaigns and create relationships to turn them into profitable customers. LeadSift offers a seven-day free trial, followed by a $29.99 monthly fee. 5. Pricing Engine — Cross-platform ad deployment Advertising on social media can get tedious if youre running a campaign on multiple platforms. Pricing Engine streamlines the process by enabling users to create a single ad and deploy it on multiple social media channels. As a one-stop-shop social media advertising tool for small businesses, Pricing Engines features include peer benchmarks against competitors, a marketing report card to gauge performance and click-through rates, and a customized action plan to help improve campaigns. Pricing Engine offers free basic accounts and paid accounts, with additional features starting at $29.99 per month. 6. WebiMax — Outsourced social media marketing If you dont have any social media marketing experience, WebiMax can help. Instead of navigating the fickle social media marketing waters yourself, WebiMax can create and maintain custom campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and other social networks. To ensure an accurate representation of a brand, WebiMax campaigns are strategically crafted and tailored to a specific business and its consumer base. WebiMax also offers website evaluation to determine the best campaign outlets, search engine optimization (SEO) consulting and analysis, web design, and search engine marketing (SEM). Contact WebiMax for a free consultation and quote. 7. LocalVox — All-in-one social media marketing solution LocalVox is a social and mobile marketing platform designed for local businesses. To drive in-store sales, LocalVox integrates things like SEO, mobile websites, email marketing, public relations campaigns, advertising and even local directories. The service also lets businesses boost social media reach by claiming profiles on distribution channels and managing their reputation on sites like Yelp, Superpages and CitySearch. LocalVox comes with an easy-to-use dashboard, which includes analytics, to-do lists, metric-based action items and customer management. LocalVox starts at $99 per month. 8. Custard Media — Go viral Custard Media is a social media marketing management and distribution tool that goes the extra mile by helping users create videos and making them go viral. The Custard Media team can manage social media marketing campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as well as content-distribution social networks like YouTube, Pinterest, Digg and Reddit. The company also specializes in SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which not only drive traffic to a businesss website, but also apply to social media marketing campaigns to maximize advertising spend. Other services include social bookmarking, updating social media channels with fresh content, and growing and engaging with followers. Contact Custard Media for a quote. 9. SnapRetail — Your own personal social media copywriter Social media isnt for everyone, but SnapRetail turns the average small business owner into a social media marketing powerhouse with ready-to-use social media content. The service offers a library with thousands of customizable, prewritten social media posts to choose from, eliminating the difficulty of crafting attention-grabbing updates. Users can drag-and-drop desired posts into social media channels, with the option to use a calendar interface to easily schedule updates. Users can also add some pizazz to posts via the SnapRetail app, which enables them to take their own photos to complement their posts. SnapRetail offers annual and quarterly plans starting at $2.75 per day. 10. Social Passport — Rewards and discounts Social Passport has a different take on social media marketing. As a 360-degree social marketing platform, Social passport aims to drive traffic to a store, reward its customers, educate business owners about customers and push deals to a targeted demographic — all using social media. It works by enabling customers to use their mobile phones to instantly like a business on Facebook, follow it on Twitter and check in on FourSquare with just a tap, without the fuss of having to open each app. This real-time social networking tool leverages social media channels by spreading the word to customers friends and followers as they claim offers and patronize the business. To measure results, Social Passport offers back-end analytics to track campaigns, sales trends and return on investment (ROI). Users can also use the dashboard to create and modify offers, as well as to manage coupons and loyalty cards. Social Passport is free to use. A premium subscription, which starts at $40 per month, is required to create a branded mobile app. 11. SparkCentral — Social media customer service Think social media marketing is all about launching campaigns? Customer service on social media platforms can also be a powerful form of marketing by showing the world how much a business values its customers. SparkCentral provides businesses with a social media help-desk platform, allowing them to quickly respond to potential and current customers questions and concerns. This real-time engagement both humanizes social media and brings brands closer to leads and followers, helping turn them into loyal customers. SparkCentrals help-desk features include automated workflow, internal collaboration, engagement metrics, trend identification and personalized communication. Contact SparkCentral to request a demo and pricing. Originally published on BusinessNewsDaily.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 21:45:19 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015