Jumpstart online marketing for small businesses with these 9 apps

Jonathan Liu, founder of digital agency Moonlight Marketing, shares his pick of online marketing applications.

There are an astounding number of apps and tools you can use to manage various social media accounts or simply track information being shared over social media. In this blog post, we’ll try and cover a handful of the most effective tools that can specifically be used in conjunction with Twitter and/or Facebook and tools that can be used to monitor analytics or for analyzing sentiment. Video: How small businesses can use Facebook.

1. Hootsuite: This is a lightweight, browser-based app useful for managing multiple social media profiles and adding multiple user-access levels. With Hootsuite, you can schedule updates, receive updates in response, post photos and shortened URLs to your various social networking accounts. In addition to this, Hootsuite also has the ability to integrate Google Analytics in order to allow site traffic and performance analysis (among other things).
2. TwitterLocal: TwitterLocal allows customers to search for nearby businesses on Twitter, and for businesses (particularly small ones) to find potential customers on Twitter based on their location. The TwitterLocal AIR client lets you keep track of as many location-based Twitter feeds as you like.
3. Twilert: A web-based app for which you need to sign up. Twilert scours Twitter feeds and enables you to receive daily email alerts at a specified time for any keywords that may pertain to your business or industry.
4. Tweet Reach: Another web-based app. Users search for a URL, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag and TweetReach analyses the number of Tweets that mention it, then reports the reach and exposure data for those Tweets.
5. Klout: Through Klout, you can compare your business to connections on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It can be used to find influential businesses within your industry—something pretty useful if you want to benchmark, network or tap into their market share. Klout is also an effective medium of publicizing your own business.
6. RSS Graffiti on Facebook: This is a free Facebook app that allows a Facebook Page administrator to link specific feeds to selected Facebook walls. It’s a great way for linking up a company blog to its Facebook page and allowing users to see what’s going on with the business.
7. Ratepoint: A tool for both Facebook and Twitter that provides customer review, testimonial and online reputation management services. It’s free to create email newsletters, collect reviews and testimonials and take surveys.
8. Shopping Mall by Payvement: The Shopping Mall facilitates the creation of a free store for your products on Facebook. Not only does this mean you have an insane amount of exposure given the number of users Facebook has, but also that you can showcase all your products in one place without paying for hosting.
9. Hy.ly: This is a service that can be used by various sized businesses to make their Facebook pages more elaborate and informative in order to attract a larger fanbase. Hy.ly’s tagline is “from fans to leads”.

They help their customers achieve this goal by allowing them to add custom tabs to their Facebook pages, making white label power posts on Facebook with a custom call to action, scheduling Facebook posts, adding FAQ sections to tabs etc.
 
They facilitate the collection of leads in a data store too. Hy.ly is available as a free version (adding a free branding tab to a Facebook page) and at a monthly rate.

 
In addition to this, they also offer custom solutions tailor-made for your business, lots of customer service and constantly keep their users updated about various changes and improvements in their products and services. Hy.ly: Cheap, attractive and effective.

About the author

This post is written by Jonathan Liu, the founder of Moonlight Marketing, a digital agency focused on social media marketing and digital advertising projects. Jonathan will be a speaker at the inaugural HelpLearn.Asia seminar that brings the brightest minds and concepts in online marketing to Asia.