Four online marketing tools that make life easier for small business owners

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online marketing tools that make life easier for small business owners

When I first talk with small business owners about their marketing needs, one topic that always comes up is that of time management. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to run a business and also send out Facebook posts, Tweets, and Google+ updates.

There are a lot of amazing tools out there to help with online marketing – as an example, check out buffersocial’s list of “61 Best Social Media Tools for Small Business”.

So to help you out, I thought I’d share my favourite online tools that make my life easier (and I promise it’s a short and simple list!).

  1. Hootsuite – I can’t say enough about how incredibly helpful Hootsuite is (and as a bonus, it’s a Canadian company based out of Vancouver). I’ve been a pro user of HootSuite for several years, and love how it allows me to manage my profiles and schedule content for a variety of social media networks (HootSuite currently supports Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, foursquare, WordPress and mixi). It has a great calendar feature where you can view all of your scheduled posts, and also has an analytics component so you can see how people interact with your content. And I especially love the auto-schedule feature, where Hootsuite determines the best day and time to share your updates.

  2. Hootlet – Technically part of Hootsuite, but it’s such a time-saver that it deserves a spot by itself. Hootlet is an extension used with Google Chrome that places a little owl icon within your internet browser. Like a website and want to share it with your followers? Just click on the owl, add your own comments, and then click on “AutoSchedule”, “Send Now” or choose to schedule the message yourself for a future day and time. Easy!

  3. TweetDeck – I previously wrote a blog post about why TweetDeck is such a great Twitter tool. As much as I really love Hootsuite, it’s just not the most visually-appealing tool out there. TweetDeck does a fantastic job of presenting Twitter content in a way that is easy to view and scroll through. And it also displays all images that people share through Twitter itself (but not Instagram photos) so it makes it easier and quicker to know what you are sharing. Similar to Hootsuite, TweetDeck lets you schedule messages for future days and times.

  4. Facebook page scheduling tool – Although Hootsuite can schedule and send posts to your Facebook page, I prefer using Facebook’s own scheduling tool to plan my posts for all of the Facebook pages I manage. I find that it does a good job of showing how a post will look in a user’s newsfeed, and it makes it easy to enable post scheduling and editing with multiple page administrators. And if you are a business owner with employees who work for you, I would highly recommend looking into having some of your staff help you out with scheduling posts for your Facebook page. Looking for the old Facebook scheduling tool on your business page? It’s moved – check out this video to find out where it went!

What about you? Do you have a favourite tool that helps you out with time management for social media? Let me know in the comments!

5 Reasons Why TweetDeck is a Great Twitter Tool

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When I first started on Twitter back in 2008, I viewed all Tweets within the Twitter interface. Then, I got hooked on HootSuite, especially when I started managing multiple Twitter accounts. I’m still a paying subscriber to HootSuite and love using the cute little Hootlet add-on to easily share interesting URL’s on Twitter. But something just seemed to be missing.

Enter TweetDeck. This slick desktop application (I prefer the downloaded version, although you can access it online as well) is always running in the background and has become my favourite way to interact with users on Twitter.

Here’s 5 reasons why I like TweetDeck so much:

1. Visually attractive – let’s face it, looks matter. And TweetDeck just plain looks good. I love the black background, the well-sized Twitter profile pics, and the fact that you can always view thumbnail images of pics that people post on Twitter.

2. It still displays Instagram images – as you may have heard, Twitter and Instagram went through a big breakup at the end of 2012. Basically, the end result was that Instagram pictures no longer display within the Twitter interface; instead, you need to click on a link and be taken to another page to view the image. Not so with TweetDeck! You can still view thumbnail images of kids, half-eaten restaurant dishes and scenery shots and also view the full-sized images within TweetDeck.

Update November 2014: Instagram images are no longer displayed in TweetDeck; instead, you need to click on the link and view the image in your browser.

3. Easily view different streams – using TweetDeck’s columns feature, you can add a new column for whichever Twitter account, list, or search result you want. And then you can quickly flip back and forth between them, making it quick and simple to keep up-to-date on what’s going on in your version of the Twittersphere.

4. It makes noise – you can turn on or off sound alerts for each of your columns, so that you hear a ding every time someone messages you, mentions you, writes a Tweet that matches your search criteria, etc. (If you want to make my computer ding, just mention @jenhames on Twitter!)

5. It’s free – I already pay for lots of social media tools and services, so it’s great to find such a great tool that is free.

Do you use TweetDeck? Love it or hate it?
Then leave a comment and let me know what you think.