The essentials: 15 social media apps and services to improve your marketing
Few business owners question the importance of social media marketing today, but doing a consistently good job with social media marketing is not easy. In fact, it can become very time consuming. Whether you take care of it yourself, or you have someone on your team who’s in charge of your social media marketing, it’s always a good idea to get outside help. This help can come in the form of an agency, a specialist, or any number of apps or software as a service (SaaS) websites. Below is a curated list of popular apps and services. There are certainly many good free apps available that will serve a lot of small businesses quite well. Further, for $20 or less a month you can start to get into some apps that are quite powerful. The apps and services provide these kinds of services: Find content for you to share Provide easy manual scheduling, Provide automated scheduling, Analyze followers, keywords, growth, etc Manage your accounts for followers Browse the list. Find the social media platforms you target and the prices where you feel comfortable, then start comparing all their features. Take some of the paid services out for a free trial run. (Legend: F=Facebook, T=Twitter, IN=LinkedIn, P=Pinterest, TM= Tumblr, G+=Google+, Insta=Instagram.) Service Platforms Free Plan Price Range Service DrumUp F, T, IN Trial $15-$159/mo find, schedule Upflow F, T, IN, P, TM, Y $29-$99/mo find, schedule Social Jukebox F, T, IN Y $13-$100/mo schedule Socialoomph F, T, IN, P, Plurk Y $6.50-$39/mo schedule, automate, analysis management Crowdfire F, T, Insta, P, TM Y $10-$200/mo content, schedule, management Buffer F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ Y $10-$400/mo schedule, analysis Good Audience F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+ N $300-$2000/mo agency service Boostagram Insta Trial $80-$160/mo Instagram growth service InstaSchedule Insta Trial $20-$90/mo schedule Round Team T Y $12-$144/mo automate Hootsuite F, T, Insta, P, IN, G+, YT Y $20-$500/mo schedule, analysis, engage SocialQuant T Trial $50-$300/mo automate Hypergrowth T Trial not revealed automate Followed F, T, IN Trial $99-$250/mo content, schedule, automate Sprout Social F, T, Insta, IN, G+ Trial $100-$250/mo schedule, manage, CRM, analysis...
read more3-plus IFTTT ‘bots’ to increase your small business productivity
Tech leaders are telling is that just about everyone will be replaced by a bot or artificial intelligence soon, so let’s start leveraging this power ourselves before it’s too late. One of the most powerful (and free) automation services available to us is If This, Then That – IFTTT.com. Trying to get started can be a little overwhelming, so I’ve picked three free “off-the-shelf” IFTTT apps that will come in handy for many small business owners. They are easy to use and will help build your confidence and understanding in the various ways the system can work for you. Scheduling Todoist is one of the most highly rated to-do list apps available today. Many small business owners depend on it. At the same time, many use Google calendar. While both of these have their specific functions, it would be nice if they could work together a bit better. There’s a good IFTTT app that automatically creates a Google calendar event for every new Todoist task. Todoist is extremely handy on your mobile devices while Google Calendar, I believe, truly excels on your laptop or desktop. If you use this app, you can get a complete overview of your daily obligations when you check your Google calendar. By the way, an app that does the reverse – creates an Todoist task when a Google Calendar event is created – is available as well. Follow a hashtag Are you trying to achieve total global domination on Twitter over one or more social media hashtags? To do this, you have to keep track of all the tweets containing the hashtag(s) you’re interested in. This also helps you discover others who are operating in your “space.” There’s a very good app that will create a Google spreadsheet entry every time a tweet with a specific hashtag is posted on Twitter. It’s much easier to analyze these tweets on a spreadsheet than it is to do a manual hashtag search on your browser. For instance, you can sort by Twitter handle to see who is doing the most posting. This is also very handy for finding good content to retweet. Turn your wi-fi reception off…or on I sometimes get frustrated when I’m out running errands – my smart phone starts acting dumb because it can’t find or settle on a wi-fi network to use. It’s constantly asking me if I want to join this or that network, or it just gets hung up. This app will send you a notification reminding you to turn off your wi-fi whenever you leave a specific location. And this one will remind you to turn it back on! The first step in any project is always the most difficult to take. I hope that by adopting one of these IFTTT apps you’ll become more familiar with the system and confident that you can make it work for you. Let us know which IFTTT apps have proved to be the most valuable for...
read moreThis week in small business: Win despite ad blockers!
Ad blockers, influencer marketing, and other issues critical to today’s business environment get good coverage in this week’s collection of curated content from around the Internet. Leadership, management, and productivity If you can use more weapons in your war against distractions this article by Morey Stettner offer six tips. We often hear that half of new businesses fail within five years. This infographic by Shubhomita Bose tells why. Serial entrepreneur Jennifer Spencer makes a great case for “slow and steady wins the race.” Tanya Lynch offers her list of the top 10 books for women in business. If you have friend whose e-commerce customer service sucks, direct him to this article by Judith Kallos. (I’m confident yours is great. Right?) Michael Kay offer seven sound and basic steps required for financial success. Marketing and sales Rhonda Bavaria sees email marketing as the power tool that may not be in your marketing tool kit. Find out if she’s right. Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead details 50 marketing tools you can use for free! Influencer marketing is all the rage but Andrew Stephan says there could be an unintended consequence that hurts your brand. Are you using and personalizing the six marketing channels described in this piece by Katie Sweet? Or how about your cross-device marketing strategy? See what Stacey Rudolph has to say in this infographic. Susan Gilbert says you can win over your brand audience despite the rise of ad blockers. Let’s hope she’s right. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Don’t let bureaucracy derail your startup. Stefan Bruun offers advice. Sarah Miller dropped out of college twice. She’s now 23 and has made $4 million…so far. Sophie Haslett tells the story. There are entrepreneurs who are making tech-fashion marketing cool, according to this Entrepreneur article by Cheryl Conner. Teyonna Ridgeway offers “10 Entrepreneurship Gems To Learn From Stephanie of Coveteur.” Hey ladies! Think you’re too old to make that dream a reality? Check out this list of overachievers by Whitney Johnson and you’ll think again. My Say examines the ability of technology to “re-humanize” sales in startups and small business. Omer Goldberg confesses that he “burned his startup to the ground.” Here are the lessons he learned. Politics, government, and the economy Noah Smith takes a good swing at explaining why Americans feel upbeat about an economy that isn’t really all that hot. For an interesting look at the world economy, read what changes young people see in a wide variety of...
read moreHow evolving into a ‘tech company’ could secure your future
How broadly do you define your business? We’re living in an age where business success is shrouded in a conundrum. Let me explain what I mean by that. Regular readers of these pages are well aware that I promote finding a niche for your product or service. The “riches are in the niches,” I like to say. And while this is very true, our current commercial climate is also supporting businesses that broadly define themselves. Typically, these are tech companies. They seem to have the okay from market watchers and industry analysts to do whatever they want and find support. For example, while a legacy company like Ford gets judged very strictly on how many cars it sells and at what kind of margins, a company like Tesla – while cars are its main product – is viewed as a “tech” company and is given a tremendously high market value despite the fact that it doesn’t sell all that many cars. We see Amazon selling virtually any item you would find in your local mall and at the same time it sells server space, streams entertainment, develops and sell gadgets, and much more. Google not only provides search results, it powers smartphones, develops gadgets, lays fiber optic cables, and much more. Right now, Facebook is getting a lot of attention because it’s gearing up to create original content, much like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have been doing in recent years. Can a small business or medium-sized business expand in similar ways? Probably not to the degree that we see these major players do it – smaller businesses just don’t have the resources to branch out so radically and take those kinds of risks. However, I don’t think there is any doubt that technology is a major element of many business ventures today. And, if technology is at the core of your business plan, I suggest you explore ways to frame yourself as a tech company, not just a local digital marketing firm, for example. When technology is at the core of your product or service, there’s a good chance you have the talent in-house to expand into other tech areas. You might find some that offer even more potential for success than the area where your current business model is centered. If you’re mining a niche for all its worth and experiencing excellent growth, you can probably put this advice on the back burner for a while. But, I still recommend keeping an open mind to letting your tech tentacles freely explore other opportunities when the time seems...
read moreHow to overcome fear and enjoy the greatest success
Remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz that introduces The Cowardly Lion? The Tin Man and Scarecrow are terrified, and Dorothy is hiding behind a tree. When The Cowardly Lion takes off after Toto, it prompts Dorothy to jump out and give the lion a little bop on the nose. Instantly, The Cowardly Lion starts to sob and whine, showing his true colors. There’s a lesson in the initial response of The Tin Man and Scarecrow that has a near universal application: The objects of our fears are virtually always much bigger in our imaginations than they turn out to be in reality. I suppose this reflects both the curse and blessing of having a good imagination: Imagination allows us to conceive of great things, but it also allows us to inflate the magnitude of our fears. This fact of human nature prevents many small business owners from achieving all the success they’re capable of. In business, some common fears are: Fear of rejection or failure Fear of the unknown Fear of confrontation Each of these can manifest itself in many ways. Let’s look at some examples that touch on different areas of your business management and leadership. Fear of rejection or failure This fear often prevents sales professionals from achieving to their full potential. Growing sales success depends on developing new leads and new ways to sell to established leads. However, sales, like batting in the big leagues, is something of an exercise in failure. The best major league batters fail about seven out of ten times. When prospecting for new clients, the best sales professionals fail more often than they succeed as well. Too often, salespeople will begin to see the next prospect through a lens that magnifies the feeling of failure. Even if you understand prospects to the best of your ability and give the best presentation, you can’t guarantee that the end result will be a sale. However, you should be able to guarantee your response if no sale results. Do not allow your imagination to take off and run with the “failure,” because it will then be in a position to hold sway over your next move, or your next session with a prospect. How many sales professionals, after a disappointment, decide to “pack it in for the day”? Fear of the unknown Business owners and leaders can let the fear of the unknown keep them from expanding, forging new partnerships, and developing new products or services. Greatness is never achieved by always doing the safe thing or the strategy with the known outcome. I think we live in a wonderful time for finding examples that should motivate us to overcome the fear of the unknown. Let me ask you a simple question: Some 20 years ago, when Jeff Bezos was trying to figure out the best way to sell a Danielle Steele bestseller online, could you have imagined him trying to figure out the best way to send satellites into space? While they may not always be successful, we are blessed by daring, unconventional, thought leadership in business today. Join that group. While you might not want to send people to Mars, there are certainly some industry, geographical, or organizational limits you need to smash through. Fear of confrontation Small business owners...
read moreThis week in small business: Be productive like Musk!
Reach those supposedly unreachable Millennials, know when to step aside at your startup, and stay productive à la Elon Musk. Those are merely three of the great articles you’ll discover this week’s collection of curated content. Leadership, management, and productivity Heidi Burkhart, President and Founder of Dane Real Estate is the subject in this edition of Laura Emily Dunn’s series on women in business. Speaking of women in business, there’s some encouraging news from the island of Jamaica, reports Romario Scott. Look over Annie Pilon’s 10 Ways to Prepare Your Business for the Future to be sure you’re all set! It just might be possible…Increase employee productivity without financial outflow, by Diana Smith. Shoot for the moon – or Mars! You’ll learn how Elon Musk and two other successful leaders manage to stay productive in Zameena Mejia’s article. Peter Daisyme gives us a good list of five books every entrepreneur should read this summer. Who better for crisis management secrets than a two-star general? (Okay, maybe a three- or four-star general, but you get the idea.) We all eventually need this advice so check out Rob Starr’s article now. Marketing and sales Tere Scott gives seven solid tips that will help you create an effective logo for your small business. To learn about influencer marketing, why not go to a guy who is an influencer in the field of influencer marketing? That’s exactly what Deep Patel does in this Forbes article. Also on this topic is Dhani Mau’s piece that asks if we should all be influencers. If you think organic search is something vegans do, you need to get up to speed on the basics. This SEO article by AJ Agrawal will do it. If you’re more advanced, you’ll want to learn how to use Semantic SEO as explained by Wells Yu. It’s a question every small business owner asks: Will my company’s social media efforts pay off? Ruby Rusine does a good job addressing the answers in her Business2Community article. Need inspiration AND instruction? Then Cen Muruganandam’s article, 7 Digital Marketing Tips and a Success Story, will do it. Writing for the Bplans blog, Jessica Thiefels outlines five small business marketing ideas for every holiday. Joey Kercher offers interesting advice on how to reach Millennials in his article, Reaching The Unreachable: How Experiential Marketing Targets Brand-Savvy Millennials. Entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation Blogging and fashion. Those both sound good, don’t they? Steve Mariotti profiles a young entrepreneur who has made those two fields work for her. In entrepreneurship, the next move is always yours, says Kayvon K. In the South Korean tech startup EverYoung all the employees are over the age of 55. Nicola Smith tells the story. Learn from the mistakes of others: 5 Important Small Business Lessons from Recent Startup Failures. David Fastuca tackles the tough question of when an entrepreneur should release the reins. Politics, government, and the economy There are a lot of articles written on the best and worst states for business, but when you get right down to it, there are probably none more unbiased than Raymond Keating’s Small Business Tax Index 2017, which lists the best to worst states for entrepreneurship and small business. Writing for CNBC, Elizabeth Gurdus reports that Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein says global statistics...
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