In today’s culture, the term “Social Media” is met either with moan or delight depending on the audience. Despite the seemingly increasing backlash against platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, these outlets only continue to grow in an audience. Furthermore, there’s no doubt that social sites and apps have been a boon to small businesses looking to reach customers and drive traffic to their websites.

The problem is that social media is a moving target and can require a great amount of time to manage. That said there are now several different tools that can make managing your social accounts easier while improving the quality of your posts and even help you boost the reach of your content.

Let’s take a look at some of the top social media tools for small business owners in a figure

Content scheduling

It’s safe to say that most entrepreneurs don’t have the time to occupy their social media accounts all day. As a result, there are now several services that allow you to schedule the content you want to post throughout the day so you don’t have to sit and babysit your social accounts. Here are a few different free and paid services to help you manage your social media marketing.

TweetDeck

While Facebook gives pages the option to schedule posts, the main Twitter site and app do not. That’s where TweetDeck can make the life of a business owner much easier. In TweetDeck, you can not only schedule your posts across multiple accounts but also manage your replies and interact with followers. Additionally, TweetDeck allows you to create columns based on certain keywords or hashtags, making it simple to find users to follow, content to share, and more.

Post creation

Another important aspect of finding success on social media is paying attention to what your posting and not just when. That’s why you may want to consider additional tools that will help you craft your content and present it to your audience.

Buffer

To manage all of your social accounts, Buffer offers a number of services for businesses of all sizes. Buffer also has some other handy built-in features, such as link shorteners and some packages include upgraded analytics so you can see what content is making the biggest impact on your audience.

Hootsuite

In many ways, Hootsuite is similar to Buffer as it too lets you schedule posts across several social platforms and offers an analytics. However, Hootsuite does have some unique features such as the support for social sweepstakes as well. This service may also be a good option for teams as it allows you to assign projects to different users and collaborate on ideas.

ViralTag

ViralTag enables you to simply click on any image in an article, optimize it for the platform you want to post to, add text and other effects, and schedule it to a number of social accounts including Pinterest, along with a link to the article itself. Additionally, on the ViralTag site, you can set up RSS feeds of your favorite sites and set some content as evergreen, which will, in turn, report it when you have an open slot in your posting schedule.

MissingLettr

MissingLettr makes easy to write content as it will first assess your content and pull out quotes it thinks will grab readers’ attention. From there you can set up posts that will be shared in one day, seven days, one month, three months, etc. after your initial publication. This gives you the opportunity to use some of your older content to reach new customers and followers.

Graphics

Great images and graphics help your content stand out on social media. In fact, on popular platforms like Pinterest, the image is often just as important as the link it’s promoting. With that in mind.

Stencil

Here you’ll find a collection of stock photos which can we utilize, templates and settings that mirror the ideal images sizes on several social media sites, Instagram photo filters, and much more. Overall, Stencil makes it simple to find an image, overlay your text, size your image, and get it ready to share with the world.

Canva

Canva offers a number of tools and features for crafting images to accompany your posts. This includes a vast array of templates as well as a library of clipart and images.

Social media is an essential part of growing a small business in the 21st century. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to get the result you want. However, with the help of some tools to do everything from building and scheduling your posts to promoting them, you can increase your social impact and drive more sales with it.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

Online reputation management (ORM) is a strategy and process of monitoring, identifying, and influencing your digital reputation and credibility online. An effective online reputation management strategy can also provide you with new opportunities and insight on increasing your brand awareness.

If you are a business owner, I’m sure you know that having a good reputation is very important for business growth. The same way it goes for digital reputation, as most people in today’s digital business lifestyle go online when they have a problem or require information regarding a specific product or service.

So that it is important to have an online reputation management to help you with social media and other digital marketing campaigns.

It helps maintain positioning

ORM is very important for a brand’s position in the market. Once the negative material is shared on the internet about a brand, more often than not it ends up losing loyalty and followers. This can in turn down the brand’s bottom line and it will be hard to earn customer’s trust.

Recruitment

Having professional staff is the foundation for a successful workplace. The top individuals in every industry are forever head hunted and by knowing that, they likely research your company and look all the facts concerning your brand before they accept any position at your company.

If you know what your competitors, clients, and employees are talking about online, it can make a big difference in hiring someone with a good reputation.

Data gathering

Data is priceless and a brand can never have enough data. Data collected through ORM monitoring helps the business formulate effective marketing and communication strategies based on the online conversations and trends. Product development and improvement can also benefit immensely from the data collected via ORM process.

Online insights

Gossip, speculation, and rumors have destroyed great names in the past and many businesses have lost the confidence of their target market due to this. Today it’s very common to see a celebrity or business with an associated scandal to simply vanish. Quite often this happens by an abundance of all the negative information floating around about them.

Show your best side

Current and potential investors, corporations, banks, and the general public are all going online to research your business before doing business with you. Look at investors as simply being consumers on a different level.

These investors don’t know your company well enough and will often make decisions on the information that is available to them. Once again if you have a negative reputation online.

During a crisis online it is very common to have inside information available but is often leaked to external sources before reaching all of the essential channels. Back in the day, it was easy to remove the issues internally before they went out to the public. In today’s technology-driven lifestyle with access to the social web in our pocket, news travels fast, especially if it’s negative. It can take seconds to collapse a brand that took years to build.

It’s a fact that customers prefer to buy brands they trust. Having done their due diligence via internet search, trust and credibility form the basis at which the customer finally spends their cash.

With an effective ORM strategy and a good Search Engine Optimization for your website, search results will always work to a brands favor. Your company or brand is only as good as your reputation.