Manage Your Social Media Efforts with Ease

Social Media is a great way for small businesses to improve their brand awareness and at the same time improve their level of customer service. Today, more than any time in the past, it is imperative to stay close to your customers and to monitor their feelings about your products and services. Also, it is important to stay in touch with what your customers are thinking about and doing!

Using social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can help but, how do you use and manage them? These social networks are very powerful, low cost and extremely effective at keeping you in touch with the needs and interests of your customers and industry. However, many of you fail to understand or to take advantage of these technology initiatives.

Why you may ask? It is probably because you don’t know how to use these tools efficiently. For many it seems to be so confusing and for others they cannot see spending the time to stay informed on what is going on in the social network world and at the same time contribute and share tweets, photos, videos and links.

There are some great tools that can help and outlined below are a few I would suggest you consider:

A couple of ones I would suggest checking out are: TweekDeck and Seesmic. These are fantastic applications that allow small businesses to use Personal Computers, Smartphone’s and PADs to search and seek out what people are saying about their businesses and to join in on the conversations. Both of these products are so easy to use and are available for free. The idea, behind these tools, is to make it easy for a business or person to connect and share relevant content across all the major social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and others; all within one application eliminating the time consuming efforts involved with posting to each social network site separately!

So if you think you would like to use social media more effectively and efficiently to communicate with your customers and prospects consider using one of these tools mentioned above. And, if you don’t have a Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook account for your business, you absolutely must!

Shaun