Social Media Tools For Business

If you have a website or a blog then it’s highly likely that you already have Google Analytics installed, and if not- you should!
Google Analytics was launched back in November 2005 and is a completely free enterprise analytics product. That means it doesn’t just tell you how many hits you have to your website- it tells you how many actual visitors you have, where they’re from, how long they stay on the website, where they come from and much more!
GA was radically overhauled back in 2011 to include custom dashboards and real time statistics and it also has a very powerful social media analytics report built in. If you don’t track your visits and visitors on your website then how can you tell if your social media presence is actually making a difference? Whatever business you are in, Google Analytics is a must. Sure there are other analytics tools that you can add in addition that can do some cool things like Crazy Egg, but I think for the majority of websites GA is the tool to use.

Buffer allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook profiles and pages, LinkedIn profiles and groups (currently not company pages) and the niche social network app.net. The only big omission is Google+ but I’ll come on to that later. Whenever you add a post to Buffer you choose which network or networks you want to post it to (for example you might want to post to your Facebook Page, your LinkedIn profile and a LinkedIn group) and it gets added to each network’s queue.

Google+ is actually the 2nd biggest social network after Facebook! As well as that, Google is taking into account who you are (i.e. authorship) much more seriously in search results and will be using AuthorRank as one of the factors in ranking your web pages. It might still be early days for Google+, but my advice is to start now- even if you only share one or two posts a week.

If you are only posting about yourself then you’re missing the point of social network- it’s about sharing other peoples’ content too. People are more likely to invest in you if you invest in others- especially if you are sharing their content. But, how do you find and keep an eye on that content? I’ve been building up a list of websites and blogs that I want to keep on top of. There are some websites that consistently produce great content- interesting articles that I learn from and want to share with others.

MailChimp is an email marketing and newsletter service with a long and proven track record. When doing research for this article, I couldn’t quite believe that they have been going since 2001- that’s not long after I first started building my own websites!

ManageFlitter (which used to be called Manage Twitter years ago before Twitter asked them to change their name) is a Twitter follower tool. On a basic level it allows you to quickly see who isn’t following you and then having the option of unfollowing these people in bulk. As well as that you can find try and weed out spam followers or irrelevant followers that just clog things up. My favourite feature is the white list- and it’s one that I couldn’t do without.