Small Business Online Marketing Tactics & 50+ Tools To Get Started
The internet is, in essence, a collective of 4.7 billion users which explains why small business online marketing is crucial.
Unlike with offline marketing, your small business is not bound by distance constraints on the world wide web.
Furthermore, small business online marketing can be completely free of cost, if done smartly. It is much more accessible and requires knowledge of your target market and the internet, more than anything else.
In this article, we list 10 such tactics to level up your small business online marketing.
10 Ways To Improve Your Small Business Online Marketing
1. Invest in Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a cornerstone of online marketing.
You can greatly increase your business’ visibility by making it appear atop search engines. It requires knowledge of popular keywords used on Google and other search engines.
You can either outsource it or invest in resources such as Soovle.com (free) to use popular keywords on your website and posts.
2. Follow And Use Meme Culture
Memes are gateway content for the internet. They’re present on just about every social media portal and are very easily consumable and shareable.
This makes a meme more than just a tool to explore humor. It is also a tool for marketing. Various brands, such as Gucci, have integrated memes into their catalog of marketing content.
They can definitely help improve your small business online marketing plan.
3. Work With Influencers
You can greatly increase engagement for your small business online marketing campaign by including influencers in the mix.
Asking them to create content will drive their audience to your products and social media. Getting them to ‘take over’ or make content for your account will increase the richness of your content.
It’s never a bad idea to use this unless you hire a non-contextual influencer who doesn’t even use your product.
4. Invest In A Graphic Designer
Give them appropriate time to finish their work. Graphic designers can take your visual content to the next level.
No amount of an amateur spending time with Photoshop can beat the work of an experienced and educated graphics designer.
5. Invest In A Social Media Creator
Give them the freedom to use their knowledge of social media. Restrict them only by telling them what your brand voice is.
There’s new content on the Internet every day. A new viral post. It’s impossible to keep up with it all unless you’re passionate about such content.
A social media creator will take your small business online marketing game to new heights.
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6. Practice Online Reputation Management (ORM)
ORM includes replying to comments, direct messages, and communicating with your customers via social channels.
If you don’t do that, start now and communicate with customers in your voice. Just look at Wendy’s sense of humor on Twitter to learn how to do ORM right.
7. Occasionally Use User Generated Content
This may come in the form of a competition. Instead of paying someone to create content for you, ask your users to. However, in order to get submissions you need to do two things:
- Make the gratification good. Something that will interest users, customers, and creators. Don’t skimp out here.
- Promote this competition on social media. So that interested creators are aware of this challenge.
The result of a successful UGC competition is great content that you can use for weeks to come that you can use in online adverts as well.
8. Follow The Big Guys
Bigger organizations have entire divisions and teams that work solely on social media. Their research, execution quality, and times are near unparalleled.
Learning from them, seeing how often they post and what’s worked for them and what hasn’t is a good way to understand internet marketing.
You can use these learnings for your small business online marketing plan, too.
9. Acquaint Yourself With Backend Portals
Every social media and website has a backend statistical portal- usually free- that you can use. These portals have all the data and stats you need to understand how well your online marketing is doing.
They will help you become more data-driven and will help you focus your energies on engaging content.
10. Showcase Customer Reviews
Word of mouth is a very effective marketing tool. While the numbers vary, some statistics say that word of mouth affects the decisions of 88% of consumers.
Customer reviews are, in essence, a form of word of mouth. They’re even more effective if your small business is restricted to a certain geographical area.
Encourage customers to put honest reviews while purchasing and ask customers to send in video testimonials, if possible.
Content Marketing For Online Business – The Ultimate Handbook
When it comes to marketing your online business, there are multiple ways to go about doing it. However, the most effective and long-term avenue to go about marketing your online business is to channel your efforts towards content marketing.
Why is content marketing so important? Well, content marketing is the basis of SEO and organic marketing. And the only way to win at online marketing, in the long run, is to rank high on search engines.
However, unlike popular belief, content marketing isn’t restricted to writing blogs or creating infographics.
Content marketing includes YouTube videos, podcasts, and any other activity that helps to optimize your website or business name to enjoy a better SEO rank.
For an online business to succeed today, it needs to have a strong footing in content marketing. In this article, we’ll look at content marketing for small businesses from all the different angles such as:
- 5 ways content marketing can help grow your online business
- 14 actionable content marketing tips for small business
- 5 tips on how to create strong blog content that stands out
- 10 new and improved interactive content ideas to boost your small business
- 7 reasons not having a content plan sets your small business back
- 7 content marketing examples to take inspiration from
- 450+ Content Marketing Services That You Can Hire Today For Your Online Business
5 Ways Content Marketing Can Help To Grow Your Online Business
Here are 5 ways on how you can use content marketing as part of your overall online marketing plan to grow and promote your online business:
1. Write Relevant Blog Posts
The basis of successful content marketing for small business depends on writing blog posts that are value-driven and relevant on a frequent basis.
The topics you write about should be relevant to the nature of your business, the products you sell, and based on what your customers and users are searching for.
Value-driven blogs that impart useful information go a long way to connect with your users and to attract new audiences that are relevant.
This is especially true if the content you post addresses a subject that people want to learn about.
The biggest advantage behind writing blog posts is to rank for long-tail keywords that your business website might not be able to rank for otherwise.
For instance, if you run an online shoe store, publishing a blog post titled “5 Sneakers You Can Pair With Formal Wear” is a great way to attract anyone looking for sneakers that double up as formal shoes.
Frequently publishing value-driven posts like “Tips To Select The Perfect Running Shoes” will do well in terms of keywords and to strengthen SEO.
In this video, Stefan from Project Life Mastery shares with you some content creation strategies:
2. Include SEO-Driven Product Descriptions
Another way to go about content marketing is to include a compelling product copy on product pages for your products.
If you are selling products online, then a smart way to incorporate content marketing is to include short, keyword-rich, value-driven product descriptions.
Doing this will help your product pages to appear in more searches and to rank high for a specific set of keywords pertaining to the nature of your product and your core competency.
For your online shoe store, your product pages should appear on Google’s search results for “men’s running shoes”.
The best way to do this is to identify a set of relevant keywords and use them in your product description’s body, title, and alt-text of the product’s images.
3. Write Guest Posts
A great way to go about content marketing for small business is to write blog posts for other websites from the same industry as you.
The idea here is to get your content published on a website that enjoys a higher authority and a high volume of traffic that is relevant to your business.
Start by searching for websites that are ranking high for keywords that you want to rank for and then approach them about writing guest posts.
You don’t necessarily need to write a blog or content piece; you can ask them to insert a link to your own blog or to include your infographic or YouTube video or your website link.
The idea behind writing guest posts is to attract backlinks from authentic websites which will help to improve your website’s SEO rank.
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4. Build Your YouTube Presence
YouTube is regarded as the second largest search engine after Google. With over a billion active users on the video media platform, YouTube marketing has tremendous potential to market online businesses.
With so many active users on the platform, there’s a high chance that your target audience is already looking for you there.
The key to use YouTube as a content marketing platform is to consistently upload high-quality videos and to optimize them by inserting the right keywords in the description and using clickbaity titles.
5. Include An Optimized FAQ Page
By including a keyword-optimized FAQ page that addresses all the most asked questions and common queries that your visitors or customers have is a great way to get your business website to rank higher on search engines.
Include answers with relevant long-tail keywords and key phrases that will help to drive relevant traffic to your website.
14 Actionable Content Marketing Tips For Small Businesses
Content marketing is the process of creating content to increase your website traffic, boost sales, attract new customers, or simply increase your brand awareness.
You can create content in multiple formats depending on your needs. For example, you could create images and videos for your social profiles; text, and infographics for your blog and newsletter; you could also share a presentation on Slideshare.
If you are new to content marketing, it might seem overwhelming in the beginning. However, the more you try, the more you’ll learn and the better results you’ll produce.
Mentioned below are 14 actionable content marketing tips that you can start using today.
1. Maintain Your Brand Voice
Every brand has a unique voice–it’s how it communicates to its users. This could be funny, witty, serious, formal, or friendly. This voice needs to be consistent across your website and all other communication.
Having a consistent brand voice is essential for users to identify and relate to your brand. Ensure that all your communication, be it blogs, websites, social posts, or newsletters, all need to have the same voice.
2. Filter Your Content And Publish The Best Ones
A user is highly exposed to multiple pieces of content from multiple brands in a day. Given their small attention span, if your content does not grab the user’s attention, then it’s a missed opportunity.
Add some texture to your content. Share infographics, videos, images to engage your users. Brainstorm a couple of topics and create a variety of content around it and ensure the content you post is of top-quality.
3. Regularity And Consistency
Consistency is key when you’re thinking about content marketing for small business. Building an audience is important, but what is equally important is to maintain your audience.
Irregularity can chase them away. Decide on the days and times when you would be publishing content and stick to it. That way the audience knows when to expect something from you, and looks forward to it.
For instance, if you fix Mondays for blog posts, Wednesdays and Saturdays for Facebook posts, Thursdays, and Sundays for Instagram posts, and Fridays for YouTube, then maintain that schedule.
4. Analytics s Key
Use online analytics tools such as Google Analytics or others, to understand how your audience is reacting to your content. For example, are they opening your emails, or are your social posts directing people to your landing page.
You could study your audience’s reactions through your analytics, and take corrective measures to fix the non-performing content areas. You could also use analytics to identify your top-performing content and improve it to get better conversions.
5. Work With Influencers
Get in touch with influencers that are relevant in your industry, and find opportunities to collaborate with them. You can either create content with them or ask them to create suitable content for their audience highlighting your brand.
Your content is going to build a certain amount of audience for you, but working with influencers could fetch you a whole new set of audience. It’s a great way to showcase your brand in front of a huge potential audience.
Influencer marketing can easily be blended with other content marketing tips to further amplify your message.
6. Timing Your Posts
Every platform has a high traffic time and low traffic period, and you must leverage that. One of the most talked-about content marketing tips is to time your posts well.
Use the platform analytics to understand when the traffic peaks and ensure you schedule your best posts during that time.
Say, your Twitter followers are most active on Friday evenings, then ensure you share your top tweets during that time.
7. Keyword Research
One of the most effective content marketing tips to reach a wider audience is by using the right keywords to rank better in search engine results.
For instance, decide the keywords you want your content to rank for and find the phrases with high volume but low difficulty level. Make sure you optimize your content for that keyword and share it.
Over a period you’ll notice your content ranking for that keyword.
8. Content Repurposing
Creating new content on a daily basis tends to get difficult especially if you have a small content team. One of the best tactics here is to pick your top-performing content and repurpose it.
For instance, a blog that worked well before can be converted into a video and shared on YouTube. Since your audience was interested and engaged with your blog post, it’s highly likely that your video will gain good traction too.
Similarly, if your audience like an educational or informative video of yours, you can create a detailed ebook on the topic, and share it with your audience.
9. Video Content
85% of all internet users in the United States watched online video content monthly on any of their devices.
YouTube is not only a social media platform but the biggest source for video content. Therefore, creating videos that highlight your products and services can go a long way in engaging with your audience.
For example, you can create tutorial videos of your product, descriptive or unboxing videos, and sometimes just educational videos about important topics in your industry.
10. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a symbiotic relationship between bloggers and publishing platforms. You can invite influential bloggers to write for your blogs. That will give you fresh content and also attract their audience to your blog.
Alternatively, you can contribute your posts to other blogs. Since a completely new audience will be reading your blogs that way, they might start engaging with you.
11. Backlinking
The quality of your backlinks is a reflection of the quality of your content offering, making you all the more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines.
When other websites provide a link-back to you, it essentially means that they vouch for your content and rely on your reputation to bolster their own. For search engines, this means that your website is deserving of prominent visibility in user search results.
The more backlinks you earn, the better your quality of content and search rankings.
12. Set Actionable Goals
Creating content isn’t necessarily the hardest part of content marketing for small business (believe it or not). The content creation strategy relies heavily on clear and defined goals – this is what so many startups find challenging.
Figure out how success can be evaluated meaningfully. Decide on what the main success metrics will be and go from there.
What’s the ultimate objective? What do you want your content marketing efforts to achieve?
Let’s say, for instance, that you want to be a leading authority in your industry. Well done. You’ve got a goal in mind.
Now stay focused and do what it takes to achieve it. You could, for example, consistently create and publish blog posts on various topics related to digital transformation.
It is also important to try and ensure that you can measure your goals. This gives you the chance to find out what works, and what can be improved.
It also has a positive effect on psychology. If you can see the results of your hard work, it prompts you to keep growing and to push harder. You get to feel a sense of fulfillment.
13. Reach Out And Get Featured
Getting a shoutout from an established platform or having a reputable media outlet mention your company can be really good for business.
From a content perspective, it allows you to collaborate with parties outside of your immediate sphere, which does wonders for exposure.
Appearing in different interviews can give your startup a significant boost in terms of brand awareness.
You can create a buzz around your startup by talking about the latest trends, insights related to your industry, and presenting yourself as a problem solver.
So, reach out to magazines, local radio channels, podcast hosts that carry out interviews with guests. Also, engage with a lot of online publications that interview budding startups. You can write them an email pitch to check if they are looking for guests.
14. Utilize Content Marketing Tools
You need to tap into what people in your industry are talking about to create effective and shareable content.
- What problems need to be solved?
- What kind of help are they seeking?
Fortunately, a number of software options are available to help you with this.
There are plenty of great content marketing tools out there that can help keep you in the loop about what’s happening in your field.
It’s important that you retain a sense of relevance when it comes to content creation because it lines up with how online algorithms function and how audience behavior works. People are looking for fresh stuff, always.
Use tools to research keywords that you can incorporate into your content, blog posts and articles, because this tactic can help you gain ground with regards to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), pushing you further towards that first page of Google.
Pay attention to others in the industry.
- What are they doing?
- How are they creating content and why are they creating them the way they do?
Seek out inspiration from trends in industry circles. You can use analytics to measure metrics related to different posts and pieces to see which ones are performing best.
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5 Tips To Create Strong Blog Content That Stands Out
Blogging is all about getting yourself, your expertise, or your business out into the world. Here are 5 ways you can create exceptional blog content that stands out.
1. Identify Your Audience
The first stage in coming up with ideas for blog post topics is considering your audience. Set yourself in the shoes you imagine to be the ideal reader for your blog.
Think about what questions they might have about your blog topic in general. If you have readers already, check their responses on the posts.
You can find out what pertinent topics they’re interested in, or issues they’d like to solve. With digital transformation now likely a part of life in many organizations, analyzing data is a core component.
You can also use the analytics of your blog to consider subjects that might be relevant to your readers based on their geography, language, browsers, or devices they are using.
For your blog, marketing people are important as are other forms of content. If you have distinctly different viewers that you try to reach, consider creating more than one blog and marketing content related to them.
2. Simplify Your Posts
It’s no mystery the Internet’s changed the way we read it. But it is not only online reading that causes people to drop in their attention span; it is also how we access the internet.
More than half of all internet traffic was conducted on a mobile device in 2018, and that rate is expected to continue to rise exponentially in the coming years.
Those small mobile screens are not suitable for reading large blocks of tiny text. Easy-to-read and skim sections with bullet points are always appreciated by mobile users, in particular.
Brands that want readers to engage with their content need to break up content into easy-to-read blocks and incorporate design elements that make it simpler to consume content.
3. Build A Strong Content Marketing Strategy
Multiple parts come together to make a good marketing plan for content. Start by planning the marketing events for the year for your organization, and use public holidays if necessary.
The aim is to create hooks around which your content can be developed.
Consider annual events that apply to your product offering in addition to seasons and holidays. Include relevant trade shows and conferences, and participation in social media.
Decide which key content offers you will be creating such as conference talks, ebooks, and webinars based on the events selected in your promotional calendar.
4. Maintain Consistency In Branding
Make sure your audience is able to associate your content with your organization. Colors, tone, text presentation, sounds, language, and visual representation are amongst the elements to consider.
5. Consistency Is Key
If you’ve been around the block, you know there are two very crucial Cs to blogging: content and consistency. These skills are perhaps the most important key to success.
It has been shown that marketers who give priority to blogging efforts are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI. That is an enormous deal. Consistency is a vital component of those initiatives.
10 New And Improved Interactive Content Ideas To Boost Your Traffic
A traditional blog, in itself, can be highly effective in gathering audience attention, if the content is unique, polished, and interest-worthy. However, interactive content ideas can potentially take your blog traffic to the next level by increasing consumer engagement and improving customer experience.
Adding a layer of interactivity can be seen as the equivalent of creating a conversation with your visitors. While comments do help, they aren’t unique, as of 2020.
Furthermore, many people don’t comment on blogs anymore. A simple reason is that there isn’t a reason or directive for them to offer their views–no outcome to their input.
Maintaining a blog that isn’t attracting any traffic is effort wasted. The key is not just to share content but share interactive content for maximum engagement and a boost in traffic.
Therefore, we’ve listed ten routes that creators can use to make their blogs interactive.
1. The Bandersnatch Route
While it wasn’t a pioneer of interactive storytelling (Give Yourself Goosebumps, anyone?), Bandersnatch did bring the ‘choose your destiny’ content back into the foray.
The Black Mirror episode allowed viewers to become part of the protagonist’s journey, and not surprisingly, the movie became a hot property for Netflix.
Bloggers can also adopt a similar approach to their content. It can either be in the form of a written story divided into fragments, or a video series.
Spreading the different pieces of the story across your blog and giving users the choice to choose between multiple routes is an excellent way to create audience retention.
This is one of the best interactive content ideas that allows viewers to stay on your blog for longer, and potentially visit the same story multiple times to opt for different choices and different ‘endings’.
2. The Radio Host Route
Back in the day (and even today, to a certain extent), phone-in radio shows had considerable popularity. You could dial in and talk to the host and express your views on a certain topic, or simply swoon over a guest celebrity.
A similar approach can be turned into one of the interactive content ideas for your blog. Podcast heavy blogs, for example, can use this approach and ask their fans to comment live. A live chat with the blogger or guest acts as a reassurance that your viewer’s words will be heard.
This approach can also be used for live videos. If you have a large enough following, expect plenty of questions, comments, and suggestions. It can be a great way to improve your blog based on viewer feedback.
3. The Teacher Route: Quizzes, Assessments, and Tests
Surprises quizzes were often the best part of the school, said no one ever. However, they work like a charm online. Quizzes that target pop culture and personality traits, or combine both can drive user engagement greatly.
Quiz takers often post their results in the comment sections and take the quiz multiple times to get the answer they want. Implementing assessments and quizzes can be one of the interactive content ideas that you try this year.
Websites such as Buzzfeed have built a reputation off of creating excellent quizzes, but smaller blogs can also indulge in this route if they create quizzes that target their audience effectively.
Instead of aiming for generic quizzes and assessments, use data to know what your audience wants and build content off of that.
4. The Fantasy Football Route
60 million people play fantasy sports. Let that number sink in. The primary driver of fantasy sports’ allure- being able to create your own squad can also be modified into one of the cool interactive content ideas.
If your blog runs on pop culture, for example, you can ask users to create a team of their favorite characters from movies or television, based on a list you provide.
These are akin to the Instagram posts that have a list of popular faces from a certain genre, and ask users which 2-3 out of the mentioned would they have on ‘their side’.
While it works excellently for pop culture, this interactive content idea can also be extended to just about any type of blog with a good following. If you have a dedicated viewer base who knows the ‘lore’ of your blog, then making lists such as this should be a cinch.
Interactive content ideas such as this allow your users to compare teams, and even voice their dissatisfaction at some popular figures being omitted from your pre-made list. All of this drives engagement and interactivity, which is excellent for your blog.
5. The Crowdsourcing Route: User Generated Content
Platforms such as TikTok and Instagram have built a living off of user-generated content (UGC). Interactive content ideas such as this work twofold;
- It allows your viewers to interact with you by submitting their work and
- It allows your viewers to interact with each other, by commenting on each other’s submitted work.
User-generated content also gives your blog a content bank that it can rely on. If a lack of submission is an issue, creating an incentive around it such as rewards for the best/most popular content can incite more of your users to participate.
It is also an excellent way to also check how your users feel about you/ your content. Submission of fan art and fan-fiction can get you into the heads of your viewers where they want your stories are taken and how they view your characters.
While most of this holds true for blogs that deal with fiction, every type of blog has its derivative UGC that it can benefit from–recipes, woodworking ideas, sample business plans, etcetera are just a few examples of what your fans can contextually submit.
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6. Draw Inspiration From Others
Reading other niche blogs will give you lots of ideas. You’ll sometimes notice things the author hasn’t detailed enough or you can take an idea and apply it to another area.
You’ll read a post about how to drive Twitter traffic, for example. You could write one about getting Pinterest traffic.
A great way to get inspiration and fresh ideas are by signing up for a free RSS reader like Google Reader. Then use the search option for Google Blogs, and search for blogs relevant to your product or service, such as Technorati and Blogcatalog.
Simply subscribe by clicking on the RSS feed and adding it to your reader when you find what you’re looking for.
7. Use A Top-Down Approach
If you want to develop a good marketing funnel for social media, a good way to create your content would be to start at the top and then make your way to the bottom. But, what does that mean exactly?
It means making a rough blueprint or choosing a theme that you will be able to follow regularly. When you do this, you can work on the details to bring some finishing touches to your content.
The reason this is a better option is that typically it’s easier to come up with ideas once you’ve got a subject. It also serves as one of the best sales strategies on the increase.
This is a great way to improve sales techniques and to have a better presence in social media. No matter what you do, you can use that strategy. Think of a brand-related topic that will find interesting to your audience, then work out the details.
8. Get Your Team To Chip In
Encourage employees to make a contribution to your blog by writing posts about a topic of industry interest.
Ask your sales and customer service teams about their most frequently asked questions, then write blog posts about the solutions. It can be a great tool to create a simple blog template for employees to use to eliminate any objections to writing a post.
9. Go Trend Hunting
Of course, many people like to stay on top of the current events and trends taking place within their industry. Have a goal of staying on top of trending topics so you can always create content ideas that your audience loves.
Make it a habit to do research on everything that is happening in your niche. It’s a lot easier to keep track and stay informed with the right tools.
Use Google News to find popular keywords that will give you the most up-to-date information about that topic. Recent information about any topic you choose is updated around the clock.
10. Find Problems And Solve Them
Some of the most popular blog articles focus on solutions. How many times have you clicked on an article regarding a “how-to”? Great blog articles help readers solve a problem.
The best way to create such an article is to draw up a list of problems. Which is your industry’s biggest challenge? What kind of daily hurdles do you try to overcome in your niche? What unique problems are you tackling?
Those conundrums contain blog fodder. Don’t just talk about that issue; solve it! Everyone wants to do away with pain points. If you can put forward a solution successfully, then you’re well ahead of the game.
450+ Content Marketing Services That You Can Hire Today For Your Online Business
Listed below are more than 450 content marketing services that you can hire today to boost your online business.
7 Reasons Not Having A Content Plan Sets Your Small Business Back
A content plan is like a scaled mind map. It helps you decide what kind of content your company is creating, what direction said content is going towards, and for how long.
The plan acts as the fulcrum to understanding your target market, aka your content audience. With time, as your company grows in size, so does your target market.
Failing to understand and plan for your audience is like trying to sell oranges to someone who wants apples. It just doesn’t work out.
A content plan lets you gauge how your audience is responding to different types of content formats, topics, the kind of social media platforms, and, most importantly, your products and services.
If the content is the gateway to your business, a content plan is how polished and appealing that gateway looks. Nobody wants to walk into a rusty, beatdown gate – in the words of Sarah Lynn, “That’s too much, man”.
We look at seven reasons why not creating and adhering to a content plan can act as a detriment to your business.
1. Your Content Is Shallow
Part of making a content plan is understanding your customers.
- What’s worked for them in the past?
- What products/services do they like best?
- Where do they come from and what are their interests?
These are just a few of the questions a marketing team asks when they create a customer persona. Combine that persona with buying patterns and you’ll have a good idea of what your message should be.
The opposite of this is just a hodgepodge of content that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. You may have an idea or some knowledge about what to create.
However, if you lack planning, most of your content might either end up looking rushed or just ‘made on the spot’. Your readers are smart and once they realize that you have nothing substantial to offer, you may lose credibility.
Loyal customers may come back if your product and services are solid. However, shallow, uninteresting content is like putting a closed sign for new customers to walk in.
Just in Time might be an excellent production strategy, but it doesn’t work when it comes to content.
2. You Miss Out On Important Events
Sure, everyone knows when Valentine’s Day and Christmas happen and that they are excellent times to share relevant content. The universality of these events makes them an easy date to market for.
But, what if your target audience feels strongly for Coconut Day (yes, it exists)? If your team doesn’t have a content plan, they might miss some not-so-universal or local days–ones that can be great for engaging your customers.
Celebrating days that are important to your audience is vital to connecting with them. Lack of recognition of the same can alienate your audience, over a long period of time.
This gets even more complicated if your target market celebrates occasions that don’t have the same dates year to year. Events such as Diwali, Hanukkah, Eid, and more are not celebrated on a fixed date according to the Roman calendar.
Lack of content planning for such major events can reduce your content, and hence, brand visibility.
3. Your Costs Can Surge
Economies of scale, don’t just apply for mass product purchases. They can also lend themselves to content. Planning allows you to recognize the resources needed for content execution.
With the help of a content plan you can figure out how many employees and freelancers, and of what experience levels, your company will need over the year (or over the marketing campaign).
You will be able to look for specialists, experts, interns, and mid-level employees with a quota and plan in mind. With your current team, your role allocation will be smooth and efficient.
Without a content plan, your situation will be quite the opposite. Last-minute hires, freelancer allocations, and role reversals are expensive.
Proper content planning can save money, time, and resources over the year.
4. You Lack A Content Bank For The ‘Ifs’
A sporting event finale is the most common example of this. A smart content plan accounts for the date of the finale and both the outcomes.
It is not unheard of to witness David and Goliath stories, sports, or otherwise. Leicester City, for example, beat the 5000-1 odds against their favor to win the 2016 Premier League title.
A smart content plan often accounts for the creation of content in case such unexpected events take place. These pieces act as a backup and allow the team to create live, relevant pieces, without clogging the flow of content.
Lack of a solid content plan will do just the opposite. Without proper planning and time management, your team will fail to create relevant and effective content.
As a result, your consumers might flock to, and share your competitors’ content. At the same time, hurried content pieces are usually first-thought and lack the insight to connect with your audience.
5. You Are Not Measuring Your Performance
This happens when you lack a content plan for a long period of time. How do you know your content has been working (or not) compared to last year?
Simply comparing your best performing content pieces year on year, will likely lead to false insights.
Without a proper content plan, you wouldn’t know which metrics to focus on. A plan is usually built on the learnings of its predecessors. You learn to enhance what’s worked and abandon or modify the strategies that didn’t.
Lack of a plan is equal to a shot in the dark. It may land and it may not. Planning is done for sales, research, and development, production, finance, accounting, you name it. It makes sense that it’s done for content, too.
A no-plan strategy isn’t a strategy at all and your team will likely never know what performs well with your audience, which is a terrible trait to have when you are trying to connect with the same people and bring them towards your products and services.
6. Your Team’s Consistency Can Be An Issue
A content team relies as much on its ability to chalk up the idea of the creative, as it does on its prowess to execute the same.
If you don’t have a content plan and your team wouldn’t know what to work with and the result will be a mix of everything.
A plan not only accounts for backups, but it also aligns targets, deadlines, performance and outcome goals, and employee bandwidth. A good content plan almost puts content generation into auto-pilot.
A team with a content plan can account for any inconsistencies in individual performance. A colleague can sub for or help out someone who can’t work on a certain creative.
Sick days and leaves, lack of motivation and creative blocks are all much easier to take care of when you have a content plan.
7. Your Team’s Accountability Can Be An Issue
The pressure to create content without understanding (or even knowing) its objective is equivalent to sheep walking forward without a shepherd. The larger your team is, the more complicated this gets.
Without a guiding plan, most creators will focus on content that has worked for them in the past. What’s worse is that some team members might work on the content that plays to their strengths, rather than focusing on the requirements of the brand.
A funny post on an organization known for its ‘formal’ and ‘corporate’ brand persona, will only confuse the audience.
A content plan unites a team to work towards one goal and teaches them the needs of an organization. It holds people accountable for certain standards. It gives your online platforms and overall messaging a clear definition.
7 Content Marketing Examples To Take Inspiration From
Whenever you’re unsure about what to do, look for inspiration. Here are some of the most successful content marketing campaigns to inspire you while curating content for small business.
1. Switchback Travel’s Image Featured Snippet
Google uses featured snippets to answer search queries on the search results pages itself.
It features them in a box right before the first organic search listing. They are considered important because they attract a significant portion of the traffic from the results below.
A great example of a featured snippet is Switchback Travel’s image, which was displayed on Google when people searched for ‘best-hiking boots’. Even though the search result was an NYTimes article, the featured snippet was from Switchback Travel, leading to their article on best-hiking boots.
Similar to Switchback Travel, you need to optimize the images you use when creating content for small business for search. Optimized images can get your content pieces as a featured snippet even if it didn’t rank high as a regular article.
2. Share A Coke
One of the most successful content marketing campaigns has been Coca Cola’s ‘Share A Coke.’ They took 150 most popular names in Australia and featured them on the bottles.
It got popular with people and everyone wanted to find their names on the bottles. People also started buying the bottles with the names of their friends, so that they could share it with them like the campaign tagline suggested.
This was simply the personalization aspect of content marketing, where Coke built an emotional connection with almost everyone. Besides, just buying and sharing these bottles, they asked people to post pictures with them on social media.
As a result, Coca Cola took the whole market by storm with pictures and posts all over social media. They even started featuring videos of people sharing these personalized Coke bottles with their friends on their official social media handles leading to a vast people of content.
3. Make A Wish BatKid Campaign
Not just a big or small business, but even non-profit organizations (NPO) have to focus on their content marketing strategy to grab the attention of volunteers, donors, etc.
The Make A Wish Foundation is one such NPO that creates special and unique experiences for children suffering from life-threatening diseases like Cancer.
In 2014, Make A Wish Greater Bay Area thought of creating a really special piece of content to grant the wish of a child in San Francisco, suffering from leukemia. His wish was to become Batman, and they fulfilled that by shooting a short documentary featuring him as Batman.
They promoted this documentary all over their social media and every digital marketing channel to create a buzz. Through that they were also able to create huge awareness about their cause, and at the same time fulfilling the dream of a child suffering from cancer.
They connected with their audience on an emotional level, used all forms of digital marketing to promote their content, and even fulfilled their ultimate purpose of supporting the community.
4. GEInstaWalk
General Electric had come out with a very unique content marketing strategy to promote its other businesses such as wind turbines and jet engines. It was rather a campaign for B2B brands.
For their #GEInstaWalk campaign, they had invited six Instagram influencers along with a few of their respective followers to give them a tour of their manufacturing facilities. All these influencers were supposed to take pictures and post them on their social media handles using the hashtag #GEInstaWalk.
As a result, without using paid advertising, GE reached 3 million people with every new tour, and hit a total of 8 million views on their Instagram handle.
5. Hootsuite’s Game Of Social Thrones
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that is quite popular amongst marketers that post social media content for small business. The HBO Dream and Fantasy show, Game of Thrones had gotten really popular around the year 2015, and Hootsuite took the opportunity of that.
The title sequence of the show was really popular amongst its audience, and Hootsuite paid tribute to the show by creating their own unique version of the title sequence. The only difference was that they replaced the names of kingdoms with different social media channels, with a Hootsuite logo in the end along with the tagline, “Unite Your Social Kingdom.”
With this unique video, they were able to grab the attention of a huge audience and make a mark with their creativity.
6. Burberry’s Kiss Campaign
Burberry has created some great content campaigns, but their best till date has been the ‘Burberry Kisses’ campaign. This content marketing campaign was created to build a buzz around their line of beauty products with a simple premise. You could send a virtual kiss to anyone in the world after choosing a lipstick.
With the help of Google, they offered an image capturing technology using an app that enabled users to press their lips against their screens to create their virtual kiss.
This kiss then could be sent to anyone anywhere around the world, and Google maps even tracked the route that the virtual kiss took to reach its destination.
The idea was quite innovative and it incorporated their audience’s love for interactive experiences and mobile technology.
7. Grow From Acorns
Acorns is an investing app that helps you round up your spare change from debit card spends, and invest these tiny amounts to create wealth over time.
This approach works great for people who don’t have time to invest or are always short of money to invest it somewhere. Their blog, ‘Grow from Acorns’ is a very effective blog and guides people about how to build wealth over time.
Through their blog, they try to educate their audience about the importance, ways, and various aspects of saving money and converting it into wealth.
They don’t try to promote their products or services through their blog but only focus on providing value to their audience.
Starting An Online Business? Build It On .Online!
How To Build An Instagram Business Page: 3-Step Process
It can be greatly beneficial for any company- big or small- to build an Instagram business page.
The page is free to access to one of the largest online customer bases. There were over a billion active Instagrammers at the beginning of 2020. Chances are this number has gone up, since then.
Instagram can both be a great place to flaunt your editorial content, as well as a hub for successful ad placements and branded media.
There are a few steps you’ll need to take in order to get the best out of the social media platform, as a company.
In this article, we look at how to build an Instagram business page and how to take full advantage of it.
Step 0: Have A Business Phone/ Phones
The importance of having a separate device for your business account cannot be understated. It allows you and your team to dedicate all your apps and space for the sole purpose of using Instagram for your business.
Additionally, it reduces the chances of any gaffes happening:
- You or an employee accidentally connect your personal accounts with the business account.
- Someone posts business media accidentally on their pages or vice versa.
- Someone sends messages to a friend from a business account or to a client from their personal accounts.
These can be at the least embarrassing and at most damaging if there are clients and monies involved.
Keep it simple and get a new phone. With tech being so accessible, getting an Instagram-centered phone shouldn’t be expensive.
Step 1: Build An Instagram Business Page
Once you’ve got the phone and app, you can begin creating your Instagram business page. However, this itself can be a different process, depending on your account type.
Part A: You’re Creating A Brand New Account
Creating a brand new account on Instagram is pretty straightforward. Instagram makes all accounts personal at first, so you will have to change it to a business account later.
Link your phone number and email. Ideally, you should have business versions for both of these, or at least the email.
Choose a handle for your account. Choose something easy to remember and something people can type without errors. Unlike other search engines, Instagram doesn’t fix a user’s typos when they’re searching for accounts.
Connect your social accounts and contacts. The easiest way to get followers is to first follow people you already know and build a network. Connecting your Facebook and syncing your contacts to your Instagram are highly recommended.
Add a nice profile picture. This can be your logo, your mascot, or something unique that represents your business. When you build an Instagram business page, you need to take care of the vanity- and the profile picture is the first step.
The above steps are automatic when you open Instagram for the first time. They will create an account for you.
However, you also need a description. Tap on the circle at the bottom right of your app interface – it will lead you to your profile. Tap on ‘Edit Profile’ and you’ll be able to add a description.
The next steps apply to both if you start a brand new Instagram account or if you’re converting your existing personal account into a business page.
Part B: You’re Converting Your New/ Existing Account Into A Business Account
Acquaint Yourself With Settings: Tap on the three horizontal lines on the top right corner of your profile. This will lead you to Settings.
In general, you should acquaint yourself with the Settings page as you will need it to make changes and additions to your business page.
Switch To A Professional Account: If you have a personal account, this option will be present in blue text, at the bottom of the Settings page.
However, if you already have a Professional account, you’ll have to tap on ‘Accounts’ in the Settings page and tap on ‘Switch to Business Account’ to build your Instagram business page.
Choose Your Business Type: When you create a Professional account, Instagram will ask you for your business type. The options range from being an artist to providing a product/service and everything in between.
Choose Between Creator And Business: Instagram wants to differentiate between businesses and creators. Since this article talks about how to build an Instagram business page, tap on business.
Verify Your Contact Information: Your business address, phone, and email.
And, voila! That’s how you build an Instagram business page. However, you’re not done here.
Step 2: Get Followers
A lot easier said than done. You can’t simply build an Instagram business page, without building an audience.
Followers lead to greater discoverability on Instagram, which in turn leads to more followers. This takes time, consistency, and monetary promotions.
These are some steps you can take:
Sync your contacts if you haven’t already. This will give your Instagram access to your network, who are more likely to follow you back.
Plug in your page when you can. And request your employees/ colleagues to do the same. Ask your friends, family to follow. Put it on your social groups. Put up a post on Facebook talking about it.
This might not initially get you your intended audience. However, a business page with more followers is more likely to pop up in conversations and on Instagram’s discovery tab.
Engage with accounts from your industry. Accounts contextual to your industry are likely to have your audience.
While you don’t need to follow and comment on your competitor’s posts, try engaging through the supply chain, or with accounts that have a similar audience base.
Follow hashtags. Hashtags contextual to your business will let you engage with your audience and potential news in the market. This will help you create better content.
Create content, regularly. This is the most important point. People are likely to follow and return to your account if you post editorial content regularly.
This will help your audience get a better idea of what your brand is, and what kind of products/ services they can get from it.
Step 3: Customize Your Account
Add action buttons to your account. Go to ‘Edit Profile’ on your business page and tap on ‘Action Buttons’ at the bottom.
You can get customers to order food, gift cards, as well as reserve appointments. This can be very useful if you plan on making Instagram a primary contact point with your customers.
Add links to your website. Also on the ‘Edit Profile’ tab. You can add links to your company website.
Get approved for Instagram Shopping. This requires a bit of work and a product catalog that you can build on your Facebook Business page, first.
To request approval, head to Settings, then tap on ‘Business’. Then at the very bottom, you can tap on ‘Set Up Instagram Shopping’ to see if you’re eligible.
If you’re not, you can read Instagram’s Commerce Eligibility Requirements to see what you can change.
Get your account verified. You can get a ‘blue tick’ on Instagram to increase your trustworthiness amongst your audience. Instagram has a few requirements for this that you can go through to learn how to get your account verified.
Starting An Online Business? Build It On .Online!
List Of 20 Instagram Business Accounts For Inspiration
Instagram isn’t simply a platform to view food pictures and memes. The platform is home to many success stories, giants, and motivators that can push individuals and small businesses forward.
In this article, we look at 20 such Instagram business accounts that can serve as inspirations to individuals, entrepreneurs, and businesses.
1. Mad Over Marketing (@madovermarketing_mom)
Mad Over Marketing is an oasis for advertising and marketing professionals looking for new ideas. The account showcases and breaks down the best marketing executions from around the world.
It’s both news and inspiration in what is one of the best Instagram business accounts for marketing fanatics.
2. Neil Patel (@neilpatel)
Neil Patel is an online marketing guru and he has one of the best Instagram business accounts on online marketing. If you’re seeking inspiration on how to improve your Search Engine Optimization game, look no further.
3. Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee)
Gary Vaynerchuk has built his success on the concept of building success. His tough love attitude and tips on how to be a smarter investor make for great social media content.
4. Pablo Rochat (@pablo.rochat)
Just when you think Pablo Rochat has exercised all of his creativity, he comes up with new, great graphics and videos.
His account is filled with creative material, which only promotes his tag of ‘Creative Director’ all that more. Check out his Instagram for laughs and to get inspired.
5. HerAgenda (@heragenda)
Her Agenda is an Instagram account that sheds light on powerful, successful female leadership.
Additionally, with the inclusion of virtual events with successful female leaders, the Instagram account has taken giant strides in inspiring a new wave of female leadership.
6. Entrepreneur Magazine (@entrepreneur)
An account for everything an entrepreneur needs to know and more. It is a great source of knowledge for small business owners and companies looking to scale.
It also celebrates up-and-coming entrepreneurs in a variety of industries. And reading their interviews is only a positive.
7. Tanner Chidester (@tanner.chidester)
One of the best Instagram business accounts for up-and-coming entrepreneurs. Tanner’s account is great for two reasons:
It teaches freelancers how to get customers online on social media.
It acts as a promotional tool for Tanner and builds his brand, simultaneously.
Additionally, Tanner’s self-made story and healthy lifestyles inspire in abundance.
8. House Of Leaders (@houseofleaders.co)
House of Leaders is one of the best Instagram business accounts for motivational quotes and videos. If you’re ever feeling down, head on over there for a mental pump!
9. WarbyParker (@warbyparker)
Warby Parker followed TOMS’s example and entered into business with a social conscience. For every pair of eyeglasses they sell, they give one to those in need.
Warby Parker’s account is not only rife with creatives, it is also inspirational as it shows that small and new businesses can also adopt Corporate Social Responsibility.
10. Fenty Beauty By Rihanna (@fentybeauty)
Fenty Beauty has more shades than their competitors for just about every beauty product out there. They celebrate their inclusiveness and that, in turn, is the reason behind why their 10.5 million followers love them.
If you’re ever looking to disrupt an industry look at how Fenty’s doing that to the makeup and beauty world.
11. Aviation Gin (@aviationgin)/ Mint Mobile (@mintmobile)/ Maximum Effort (@maximumeffort)
Brand personas- what are they? In case you don’t know the answer to that, look at these three companies. They’re all owned by Ryan Reynolds and are all extensions of his quirky personality.
By transferring his likeability onto his brands, Ryan Reynolds shows us how to build a successful brand persona.
12. Worn Wear (@wornwear)
Worn wear by Patagonia aims to inspire a new generation of sustainable clothes-shopping.
The account, among other things, shares stories of individuals who, instead of throwing torn clothes, have learned to patch and reuse them.
13. Brit + Co (@britandco)
Founded by Brit Morin, britandco has a great deal of content ranging from posts that focus on emotional intelligence to an out-and-out business course for those looking to start their self-made journeys.
14. Greats— Premium Sneakers (Greats)
Greats is great (no pun intended) for multiple reasons. The Brooklyn-based sneaker brand does a brilliant job at marketing and integrating its brand with other brands and media.
Their posts on collaboration with High Snobiety and Animal Crossing are just two examples of Great’s smart marketing.
15. Kobe Eats (@kobe_yn)
Kobe’s Instagram business account has plenty of sponsorships and regular content. Except, he’s a grand total of 2 years old!
Kobe’s account shows that you’re not too young to start your content journey and that the best content is made while having fun.
16. Baddie Winkle (@baddiewinkle)
Or too old. Baddie Winkle is a grand total of 92 (!!!!). She started her Instagram journey, much later than most people do in their lives.
But it didn’t matter. She adapted to new technology and inspires many individuals to think about whether they’re too late to try something new out.
17. Miquela (@lilmiquela)
Miquela shows us that you don’t even have to be human to start Instagram business accounts. The robot influencer has 2.9 million followers, great content, and endorsements from brands such as Mini.
18. Chelsea FC (@chelseafc)
While there are football clubs with a greater following than Chelsea, the London-based club has taken strides in their global approach by making exclusive content for their international fanbase.
It is a good example for brands looking to address a global audience- content needs to be specialized.
19. Apple (@apple)
Apple is, undoubtedly, a company with one of the best marketing strategies and content. And it shows on all their Instagram business accounts.
The company’s accounts are both aspirational and serve as a source of inspiration for brands looking to promote their products on social media. Apple doesn’t push its products. They haven’t for a while.
They just show how much their products can achieve, with creative content on social media.
20. Netflix Is A Joke (@netflixisajoke)
Netflix Is A Joke is a masterstroke by the streaming giant. Instead of worrying that a comedy-focused account would cannibalize on their main account’s marketing, Netflix simply went with it.
And it works. The account has a great following and shows just how many comedy specials and shows are available on the platform for customers to choose from.
Accounts such as this and those by Red Bull show that, if done smartly, your brand can also adopt the multiple account strategy.
Starting An Online Business? Build It On .Online!
How To Use LinkedIn For Small Business: Strategies For Beginners
Even though millions of professionals use LinkedIn to grow their careers and network, most of them don’t know how to use LinkedIn for small businesses.
LinkedIn can be a wonderful tool to promote small businesses as well.
By helping you make connections, generate leads, establish a partnership, create brand awareness, and so on, LinkedIn can do wonders for your digital marketing strategy.
Before getting into how to use LinkedIn for small businesses, here are a few noteworthy benefits LinkedIn provides for small businesses.
Dramatically Grow Your Network – LinkedIn is not just another social media platform where people come to consume all kinds of content. Since it is a strictly professional platform, any audience that you build would be for business-related purposes.
Do Market Research – Professionals and businesses from your industry would also be on LinkedIn just like you, and it’s the best place for you to do your market research.
Find New Hires – LinkedIn has always been a platform for professionals to showcase their resumes and connect with companies with good opportunities. Whenever you are looking to hire for your small business, you can find highly talented individuals who can add value to your business.
Check-In On Your Competitors – Your competitors are using pretty much the same strategy that you’re using on LinkedIn. Keep an eye on them, see who they’re connecting with, the projects they talk about on their posts, and more to understand them and learn from them.
Spot Industry Trends – With the help of its Skills & Expertise search function, you can stay updated about the latest industry trends on LinkedIn. You can also find noteworthy topics for your blog on it.
Build Your Online Reviews – There’s nothing like reviews for any business, and what could create great authority for your business is having reviews on LinkedIn. When other brands, customers, or organizations, find positive reviews about your business on LinkedIn, they are more likely to associate with you.
Now that we’ve covered the benefits of LinkedIn for small businesses, here’s a guide to tell you how to use LinkedIn for small business:
1. Build A Strong Company Page
Unlike individual profiles, LinkedIn company pages are better suited to represent a brand or organization. Even if you run a small business, creating a company page and then connecting it with your own profile would be a great move.
Posting updates and information from a company page makes it look like it’s coming from a well-established brand and not an individual.
2. Leverage Your Individual Profile
Having a company page doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t promote your business through your individual profile as well. Since you are the one behind your business, showcase it all you want, and even add the links to your website, social media accounts, blog, etc. on your personal profile.
3. Start A LinkedIn Group
LinkedIn has a great feature that enables you to start a group revolving around a specific interest. Connect your business to a general topic that can engage people, start a group about it, stir a discussion, and get the members to know about your business through the group.
4. Get Employees And Partners On Board
If you can involve your team or other professionals in your LinkedIn activities, you can attract a lot more attention to your small business. When strangers see that your company page is being followed by such skilled and experienced professionals, your credibility automatically becomes more solid.
5. Share High-Quality Content Consistently
Your LinkedIn content is supposed to be as good as your business website or blog’s content. Whatever you post, make sure that it’s well written and showcases you as a thought leader in your field.
Besides, you can also optimize your bio, updates, posts, etc. for SEO. Use the right keywords in all these places so that your LinkedIn page shows up, to people who might be interested.
6. Interact With Other Small Business Owners
LinkedIn is a social media platform at the end of the day, and it must be treated like one. The key to any social network is interaction and engagement with your audience.
If you start interacting with your audience, you might end up finding a lot of potential talent, organizations, partners, and so on, with whom you could work. Besides, it would also help you in growing your audience, and eventually your customer base.
7. Explore LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads for small business is a great way of promotion. It’s basically a ‘Sponsored Updates’ feature and is more like a “pay-per-click” ad.
Even though it offers demographics like gender, location, or age like other platforms, the key difference is that it can also be customized based on the company name, job function, job title, skills, groups, etc.
People are hardly interested in pure advertising now and they expect something valuable in return. With the help of LinkedIn Ads for small business, you can promote your content, and attract a huge audience, generate leads, and even convert them into customers.
8. Join Active Groups
Creating your own group and publicizing it is tough–but what’s easy is to join active LinkedIn groups that are renowned in your industry. It can help you widen the scope of your network to a huge level.
Since you will find a lot of your competitors in the groups, it could be a great place for you to learn from. Also, the groups allow you to message the members, so you can easily connect with whoever you want to for business purposes.
9. Optimize The Summary Section
The summary section is usually the most overlooked section on your profile. LinkedIn allows you to use 2,000 characters to tell your target audience, about yourself, and you should use it as efficiently as possible.
Write in the first person, use complete sentences, and address their pain points very clearly. Treat your summary section as your first impression on your target audience, and make sure that it’s the best one.
Mostly, people like to connect with the person behind the product or service, and this is the best opportunity for you to introduce yourself to potential clients and customers. Also, don’t forget to include your contact information towards the end of the summary section.
10. Personalize Your URL
By default, your LinkedIn profile will provide you with a generic LinkedIn URL. When using a generic LinkedIn URL, any changes that you make to your profile will end up changing your URL.
As a result, search engines such as Google are unable to rank it in their Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).
Get your personalized URL with the following steps:
- Move your cursor over ‘Profile’ and select ‘Edit Profile’
- You’ll find a URL link under your profile picture like ‘www.linkedin.com/in/yourname’
- Move your cursor over that link and click the ‘Settings’ icon.
- Under ‘Your public profile URL section’ on the right, click ‘Edit’.
- Type the last part of how you want your personalized URL to be in the text box.
- Click ‘Save’.
10 Best LinkedIn Groups To Join For Small Business Owners
LinkedIn is a very important networking platform for small business owners, but with around 400 million users, it might get difficult to get the best out of it. One of the best places to obtain answers for your business questions could be LinkedIn groups.
However, there are around 2 million groups on the platform, and to find the right ones to join and devote your time too, could be another challenge.
We have done our own research and collated a list of the best LinkedIn groups for small business owners to make it easier for you.
Let’s look at the 10 best LinkedIn groups for small business owners:
On Startups — The Community for Entrepreneurs
With more than 600,000 members, this is the largest entrepreneurial startup group on LinkedIn.
The main focus of this group is to help entrepreneurs with discussions on startup marketing, financing, sales, hiring, operations, and any other small business or startup related topic.
It can also help you in planning your startup growth strategy.
A Startup Specialists Group
This is one of the largest communities for startups, founders, mentors, and investors. The discussions of this group are focused on everything related to startups.
Being one of the biggest online networks for entrepreneurs, it covers topics on founders, investors, mentors, incubators, accelerators, crowdsourcing, and venture capital.
Social Media Marketing
This one is the largest LinkedIn group that is dedicated purely to social media marketing.
It covers some of the best social media marketing strategies that are out there making it a highly valuable resource for small business owners and entrepreneurs struggling with their online presence.
Small Business Network
Just like the name suggests, this group is one of the best LinkedIn groups for small business owners, since it’s entirely focused on that. The group was set up for small business owners, entrepreneurs, and founders.
Entrepreneurs who start-up, grow, and manage SMBs & SMEs have a lot to gain from this group. It covers important aspects such as loans, financing, franchising, deal structure, insurance, accounting, tax, legal, and software.
This group also covers a rather holistic view of digital marketing. It shares ideas and advice on web designing, online marketing plans, strategy, development, opportunities, and social media.
Digital Marketing
With more than a million members, this group covers everything that is there about digital marketing.
You’ll get to learn important aspects of the digital marketing landscape, including social media marketing, search engine marketing, mobile marketing, online advertising, and more from here.
It could also be really helpful if you want to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) and everything in between.
Besides, it provides updates to industry reports and white papers so that the members are abreast of trends, innovations, and the best digital marketing practices prevalent in the market, as well as organizes social and networking conferences and events.
With close to 300,00 thousand members, this group is committed to collaborating for the improvement of leadership.
It aims at identifying the relationship between leaders and followers with the help of open discussions about leadership practices and concepts.
It is highly helpful for entrepreneurs because of its goal of developing people and their small businesses through creative content and community engagement.
Entrepreneur’s Network = Eprenz.com
With a network for both accomplished and aspiring entrepreneurs, this group has a global feel to it and almost 100,000 members.
It is the perfect place to ask questions, find answers, and to connect with many other aspiring global entrepreneurs.
Since this group hosts mainly entrepreneurs, it is one of the best LinkedIn groups for small business owners.
It enables its members to indulge in discussions with other like-minded people and broaden their horizons.
SEO Expert
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a concept that most small business owners struggle with.
However, it’s very important to understand and nail the art of SEO to be able to get your small business the reach it needs.
This group is specifically for search engine optimizers and marketing professionals to discuss the ways to use SEO to drive their businesses to success.
The group also shares the latest trends and tips related to digital marketing and SEO.
Marketing & Communication Network
This is again one of the best LinkedIn groups for small business owners since it can guide them on how to use marketing and communication networks to grow their business.
It covers important topics such as marketing, sales, advertising, public relations, digital marketing, market research, social media, and many more.
Many small business owners have a great product or service but are not able to achieve the success they deserve because they lack marketing expertise.
This group can help them overcome that, and also in building great relationships with clients and customers.
Harvard Business Review Discussion Group
Harvard Business Review or HBR is a general management magazine that is published by Harvard Business Publishing, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the renowned Harvard University.
They also have a group on LinkedIn called the Harvard Business Review Discussion Group, and it is considered to be one of the best LinkedIn groups for small business owners.
This group can help you with the better management of your business, and even with becoming a better leader. Great business tips are shared on a regular basis and you can get a lot to learn from here.
Starting An Online Business? Build It On .Online!
How To Use Twitter For Online Business: 20 Strategies And 50+ Tools
If you’re looking for ways on how to successfully use Twitter for online business marketing, then you’ve come to the right place.
A new online business might wonder, why should we include Twitter in our social media marketing plan?
The answer is simple – Twitter marketing can become a great asset for any brand if done right. The platform caters to an audience born and raised in an era with shrinking attention spans. 280 characters are all that a brand has to speak about itself.
Such a limitation can compel a brand to become laconic and remove unnecessary bells, whistles, and fluff from its message. Additionally, with 330 million users, almost half of whom are daily visitors, Twitter presents brands with a gigantic pool of people to work with.
Moreover, according to research conducted by Twitter, 93 percent of Twitter community members are open to brands getting involved. So, for your brand to not be present on Twitter would be missing out on a great opportunity to engage and convert your audience.
Brand involvement on the platform is not just confined to promoting products and services. It extends to providing support, sharing informative content, running contests, participating in social causes, and more.
In this article, we’ll look at the two most important aspects small businesses need to pay heed to when it comes to using Twitter for online business success.
- What are the best marketing strategies for Twitter?
- Which Twitter tools can online businesses use for marketing?
What Are The Best Marketing Strategies For Twitter?
Listed below are ___ strategies that you can adopt to successfully use Twitter for small business marketing.
1. Audit Your Twitter Account
Before you begin marketing on Twitter for business growth, it’s crucial to know where you stand right now. Auditing Twitter profile of your business encompasses various tasks such as analyzing audience and content performance, measuring return-on-investment (ROI), and more.
For an in-depth account of Twitter performance, you can use tools such as Twitter Analytics and Google Analytics. The former tells you about the performance of your tweets, engagement rates, etc. The latter provides information related to traffic and audience demographics.
2. Let Your Bio Do The Marketing
Your Twitter bio is probably the first thing users come across; it is the gateway to the rest of your Twitter marketing content. Your bio can serve multiple purposes. A quick jaunt down Twitter will show that different brands use their bio for different purposes.
Nike, for example, usually has their famous brand slogan, ‘Just Do It.’ as their bio, and don’t change it, unless they feel that something greater needs talking about, which explains their present bio ‘#blacklivesmatter’.
Conversely, a smaller company or a subsidiary might simply use their bio to advertise their new product or service. Naughty Dog, a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment, has a quick mention of their latest video game.
Your Twitter bio, therefore cannot be made in frivolity. It must serve a purpose- talking about what your brand is, what they stand for, or what service/product they provide.
3. Set Well Thought-Out Goals
To successfully use Twitter for small business marketing, goal setting is imperative. This is why auditing your existing profile is important. It clearly depicts how much effort you need to put in to accomplish your goals.
As a business, your goals and milestones can be related to lead generation, brand awareness, customer service, and reach and engagement. Once you know what to achieve, you can write down the goals.
For example, you can set up a goal to generate 100 leads from Twitter every month. To achieve this, you can measure performance metrics such as impressions, engagement rate, link clicks, etc.
You can enable conversion tracking to analyze user behavior and optimize campaigns for conversions.
4. Share Engaging And Valuable Content
Whatever your goal may be, the content you share has a major influence on whether you’ll achieve it or not. If lead generation is your goal, for example, you must engage your Twitter audience by posting informative content that addresses their pain points.
Although maximum Tweet length is 280 characters, you should keep your Tweets short, crisp, and compelling to convey your message straightforwardly.
To attract users’ attention, try using numbers, brackets, and power words that evoke emotions. You can use media files to engage with your audience in a better way.
Don’t forget to insert a call-to-action and a link to the landing page. These are required to boost click rates and conversions.
5. Get Creative With Your Call To Actions (CTA)
Your CTA is essentially what you want your audience to do after they view your tweet. But simply saying something like ‘click this link to go to this page’ may not be enough.
Along with implementing features such as Twitter Cards, you must also write a top-notch copy for your CTA. To make your links take as few characters as possible, make sure you use a link shortening service like Bitly or TinyURL.
However, your CTAs can do more than just lead people to your landing pages. You can also use your CTAs to get your customers to direct message you. Twitter’s direct message is a lot more relaxed with the characters and allows up to 1000 DMs a day, which can be very useful if you’re running a B2B business, or is contacting a small pool of customers at once.
6. Make Use Of Twitter Cards
Cards can take your Twitter marketing to the next level. In layman’s terms, Twitter Cards is a feature that allows a user to embed different types of media, which can lead to a landing page or a destination, into their tweets.
There are four different types of Twitter cards, including those in which you can embed links to download a mobile app and another one that lets users play videos and music.
This is a great feature that makes your tweets both beautiful and result-inducing. Users and viewers are less likely to click on a random link as compared to a link with a preview that shows them a summary of what they’re clicking into.
Twitter Cards are fairly easy to set up, though one needs an ad account to be able to access them. The video below does a good job of how to create your very first Twitter card.
7. Be Wise With Your Hashtags
Using valuable content is not enough. You must ensure it reaches the right target audience. Using hashtags is an intelligent way of categorizing your Tweets by using a hash symbol in front of a keyword.
It’s recommended to use two hashtags per Tweet. You can use more, but it’s better to avoid too many to prevent spam.
For example, to promote this blog post on Twitter, you can use any two of the following hashtags:
- #marketing
- #socialmediamarketing
- #TwitterTips
- #SMM
If you want to find popular hashtags related to your niche or content, use a tool such as Hashtagify.
8. Encourage User Engagement
Besides extending audience reach using hashtags, it’s important to ensure high engagement rates. Twitter users interact with your content by liking, retweeting, sharing, and commenting on your Tweets.
You can boost interaction by asking users to take action, tagging friends, or asking to retweet, for example.
There are innovative ways to elevate user engagement levels. For example, you can use Twitter chats to increase user activity on your Twitter profile.
Content Marketing World does it on Tuesdays by holding conversations related to content marketing. The experts ask questions and users answer them or vice-versa.
9. Use Twitter As A Customer Query Platform
While 1800 numbers are great to have, waiting in in a long telephonic queue to get your questions answered isn’t the most appealing option, especially if you have a small complaint that needs resolving.
Plus, no one else will know if you do an exemplary job at resolving your customers’ complaints on call. Twitter can be a great way to both solve a customer’s query and show off at how great your brand is at it.
The platform can be used to solve serious customer queries and to reply to jibes and jovial comments. Not to tweet the Wendy tweet, again (puns intended), but the pictures below show how well the brand handles the platform.
Having a bit of fun is also great!
10. Let Your Persona Do The Talking
Your brand persona may not be a real person, but it has a personality, a voice, and its own opinions. The brand constructs this to better display its voice to its consumers, so it makes total sense for the brand to use that voice while communicating on Twitter.
The top ten most followed accounts on Twitter belong to individuals and not brands. The stat speaks volumes. It tells us that users on Twitter are used to a certain kind of communication- they want to talk to and hear from people, not robots.
Therefore, developing your brand’s voice, becoming more conversational, and adding a personality to your tweets is the way to go. Mercedes-AMG F1 does a fantastic job at this. Everything from their bio to their communication has a consistent personality to them.
Viewers know that they are communicating with a brand, but the humor in Mercedes-AMG F1’s tweets, their conversational tone, when addressing commenters on their twitter and their open expression of their social beliefs have made their Twitter account an example to all competitors.
11. Post Regularly
This goes without saying, but regular communication is the key to keeping your stakeholders engaged. Random tweets at random times may be detrimental to your Twitter marketing strategy, but may still keep your potential customers engaged.
What’s worse is if your account goes AWOL for a significant amount of time and then tries to earn back views. Such a strategy is bound to crash and burn, as it will fail to get any brand recall. Users might just unfollow upon seeing sporadic and lackluster communication.
It is best to keep and rigorously follow a content calendar/schedule that keeps your activity regular and in check. A content calendar can let you plan ahead and potentially create a bank that can come in handy during busy periods and times when creativity might take a slump.
12. Repost Relevant Tweets
If you are a smaller creator or brand, another good strategy is to repost. Twitter allows anyone to repost. It can be a neat way to display good reviews, praises, awards, and other mentions of your brand, products, or services.
Brands can also repost news from their industry, or even something they find interesting (that adds to the personality of their brand persona)- to do this a brand must know their customers and know what they find interesting, as well.
A core element of Twitter marketing is to keep your consumers engaged and reposting is a good way to do that.
13. Use Polls & Media To Engage With Your Audience
A great way to know what your consumers want is by simply asking them. With an active daily audience of millions, Twitter is a busy platform. Therefore, it makes total sense to engage with the audience and ask them questions that can both give your brand insights about your products/ services as well as about how your consumer base thinks–what they like and dislike.
These polls can be created right from the posting box and can be created to gather objective knowledge as well as subjective opinions.
Polls aren’t the only inbuilt feature on Twitter. Tweets with videos and pictures can also increase engagement. From showing movie trailers to uploading pictures that give your audience a sneak peek of your upcoming product, using media on the platform can really up your Twitter marketing game.
14. Collaborate With Influencers
Influencer marketing is on the rise. 80 percent of marketers believe that it’s an effective marketing strategy. Since most of the influencers are experts in their fields and have a massive social media following, it’s wise to collaborate with them to tap into their audience.
However, ensure that the influencer’s audience is similar to the one you are targeting on Twitter. 82 percent of consumers follow recommendations of micro-influencers.
So, instead of tying up with macro-influencers who have more than 100,000 followers, collaborate with micro-influencers who have a few thousand followers. You may see better engagement rates and higher ROI.
15. Run Contests
Holding contests is a form of viral marketing that, if done right, can produce impressive results. Since you are using Twitter for business growth, choose a contest goal that’ll aim at generating leads or increasing brand awareness. After this, set up the contest, promote it extensively, and monitor progress to ensure the campaign is a success.
For example, if you are an SEO agency, you can run a contest wherein you’ll ask users to write a one-liner about the importance of SEO, share it on Twitter, tag you and one of their friends, and use your contest hashtag.
In exchange, you can offer a free website audit for everyone who participates in the contest. For the lucky winner, you can provide a free 3-months SEO package.
16. Run Paid Campaigns
To successfully use twitter for business, consider running ad campaigns to reach a broader audience. Based on your marketing goals, whether its awareness, consideration, or conversion, you can set up promoted campaigns using Twitter ads.
Further, there are various objectives to choose from based on your specific requirements, such as maximizing reach, app installs, website clicks, gaining followers, and more. The ads may show up in the user timelines, Twitter profiles, search results, and at other places.
Here’s a quick video to get started:
17. Form Social Media Partnerships With Other Brands
As mentioned above, a conversational tone works best with Twitter marketing. However, this does not simply apply to brand to customer communication. With Twitter, you can also communicate with other brands to create a ‘story’ or a social media partnership to bring out your brand’s personality even more.
Twitter’s User Interface that is built on following threads of communication, as well as discovering new tweets can help you highlight a conversation with another brand, with ease.
A really fun example of this is the relationship between Tinder and Netflix India. The two often reply to each other’s tweets with sassy messages that often hint at some form of a romantic relationship between the two brands. What’s better is that Durex India sometimes joins the conversation and acts as a third wheel.
18. Use Third-Party Services For Analytics
Consistent, well-timed, and good quality content always takes the prize in Twitter marketing. However, sometimes additional help is needed to make that happen. This is especially true if you have a small marketing team handling multiple Twitter accounts.
Services such as Hootsuite and Buffer let you schedule your twitter content, manage your multiple accounts in one place, and come with analytics tools that let you see what’s working and what’s not.
Plus, every third party application has its own set of additional features, which makes posting content easier. For example, Buffer comes with a browser extension that lets you share an article that you like to Twitter, almost instantaneously. Something like this makes reposting easier.
These services take the guesswork from Twitter marketing and help you make calculated and educated approaches.
19. Automate Twitter Marketing
If you are managing multiple social media accounts simultaneously, it may get confusing and overwhelming for you. In this case, consider managing Twitter marketing campaigns with the assistance of a social media automation tool. It lets you plan, creates, schedule, monitor, and manage campaigns effectively.
Tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer are not just suitable for posting on social media but for customer service and social listening as well. You can resolve customer queries, monitor conversations, analyze mentions, speculate the latest trends, and much more.
20. Make Multiple Twitter Accounts
Making multiple accounts makes total sense if your brand has a strong international presence. A major aim of corporations is to make their products as uniform as possible, across the globe.
However, people from different countries cannot be targeted with the same strategies; we’re just not that uniform as a planet, yet. Culture, history, and language play a big role in the content people find acceptable. Humor from one country, for example, may not translate well in another.
Therefore, international accounts are a must. And most brands know that. However, brands need not just stop at making glocal accounts. Many brands make accounts specific to a line of products or content.
Netflix Is A Joke (NIAJ) is a great example of that. The social media account, owned by Netflix deals with everything related to comedy on the platform.
The existence of Netflix Is A Joke eases up Netflix’s content calendar. While the main account does promote comedy, the bulk of that genre is taken by the branch account. It is a smart move that any large business/service can adopt.
Having multiple accounts of different genres can also create a door for a new audience to enter. Comedy-only diehards might find NIAJ more relevant to their needs, for example. This way, brands can target the masses as well as a smaller niche audience.
These accounts can then be used to repost each other’s content, also, which is only a positive, if anything. Brands must just be careful to not create accounts that cannibalize each other’s audience.
50+ Tools To Get The Most Out Of Twitter For Small Business
Twitter offers a dais for just about any type of business to effectively reach their target market.
However, the potency of the social media platform can be made to go on a whole other level, with a few tools. These tools, when used together, can and will ease your online business’s activity on Twitter.
From tracking the impact of your campaign to finding content online to retweet on a daily basis and keeping your engagement healthy, there is enough on this list to help you do it all.
Listed below are more than 50 Twitter tools that can use to successfully use Twitter for small business marketing.
Category 1: Communication Tools
1. Tchat.io: Tchat makes talking about a particular topic or hashtag, very easy. All you have to do is type that particular hashtag and it searches all relevant conversations for you, so you can get chatting!
2. Chat Salad: This brilliant Twitter tool will let you track when certain hashtags and conversations are scheduled to start, so your small business can stay relevant in certain conversations.
3. TwChat: It is very difficult to track chats, hashtags, and responses on Twitter. The twitter tool creates a chat room for any hashtags you enter, so you won’t have to sieve through everything on Twitter.
4. Twubs: Twubs is the Twitter tool equivalent to a calendar invite. It lets you host and schedule Twitter chats and keeps your small business punctual!
Category 2: Discovery Tools
5. The Latest: Head to latest.is to get the ten most popular external links attached to Tweets. This is an excellent tool for your small business because with it you can educate yourself about the kind of links people are clicking on.
6. Nuzzel: Nuzzel’s Media Intelligence keeps you up to date with what’s happening in your small business’s industry. Getting early access to industry-related trending news is invaluable.
7. Crowdfire: One of Crowdfire’s most powerful features is its ability to curate the best articles from across the internet. This cross-platform tool will keep your small business up to date with what can work on Twitter and other platforms.
8. Twipho: Twipho uses pictures to tell you what’s fresh on Twitter. It’s a great way to stay connected to the visual side of the social media platform.
9. Twurly: Twurly makes getting links from your Twitter very easy. It sends you daily emails with links so you don’t have to do the manual work.
10. BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo is a cross-platform tool that tells you the best performing content on the internet. All you have to do is enter keywords or domains. It is a fantastic tool for your small business to stay relevant to trending conversations.
Category 3: Follow Management Tools
11. ManageFitter: Among other things,ManageFitter lets you search for relevant influencers and users who you can follow. This is a great tool if your small business is planning on working with influencers or even seeing what competitors are doing.
12. Tweepi: Tweepi is a great way to monitor competitors, relevant users, and accounts that are using the hashtags you’re keeping an eye on. All a small business needs to do is use @s and #s. It’s that simple.
13. Followerwonk: A great tool for small businesses to segment their Twitter followers, look for new ones, and compare their accounts with competitors to see follower and influencer similarities.
14. Daily 140: While its name may have aged, Daily 140, still remains an excellent tool to track the activities of Twitter users relevant to your small business. Who are they following? What Tweet have they liked? Get it all on email with Daily 140.
15. Twindr: With a Tinder-like interface, Twindr lets you swipe left or right on the users you want to follow and unfollow. It makes Twitter spring cleaning fun.
16. Commun.it: This all-round Twitter tool does a lot of things. But most importantly, it lets you know who has unfollowed you, who’s not following you back and who you should follow.
17. DoesFollow: Want to know if your competitors are following Drake? What about Elon Musk- who is he following? You can get these specific answers on DoesFollow, which lets you know whether User X is following User Y or not.
18. FollowFly: FollowFly lets you make informed decisions about who your small business should follow on Twitter. Just look up a particular account and their best tweets show up.
Category 4: Analytics Tools
19. Audiense: Audiense works in two parts. It provides your small business insights on your audience, effectively making you understand them better. It also works as a Twitter marketing platform, so that you can seamlessly put those insights to great use.
20. SocialRank: SocialRank is both follower management and a Twitter analytics tool. However, its impressive collection of 10 million analytics reports on over 2 billion social profiles, gives it a place on the analytics list.
21. Twitter Analytics: A no – brainer for any small business on Twitter. The platform’s inbuilt analytics tool is powerful and worth exploring.
22. Twitonomy: With Twitonomy, you can get analytics on just about anything on Twitter- from tweets and mentions to your own follower growth over a period of time.
23. Social Bearing: Social Bearing’s powerful Twitter search engine and analytics features can be used to track what users are saying about your brand (among other things), which is invaluable information for any small business.
24. Crowdriff: A fantastic tool for travel brands on Twitter, many of Crowdriff’s features (including its powerful insights tool) were built off feedback from various tourism brands from around the world.
25. Bluenod: Bluenod’s presentation of its analytics is equivalent to that of a football heat map. This makes the generated influence of certain users very easy to understand.
26. Tweroid: A simple tool that can tell you what is the best time to tweet, based on analysis of your tweets’ performance and your followers’ tweets.
Category 5: Trend Search Tools
27. Trendsmap: Very literally named, Trendsmap is a tool that displays the most trending hashtags and conversations in different parts of the world, on a map. It lets small businesses know what is trending locally in their area.
28. Trends24: The website shows you an hourly breakdown of all the trending terms from within a 24 hour period. If your small business tweets often, this is a great tool to make your conversations engaging.
29. iTrended: iTrended creates detailed reports of whether certain keywords trended or not, and in what areas they trended and how they performed, overall. It is a great tool to learn who is engaging with your content.
Category 6: User Interface & Client Tools
30. Happy Friends: Happy Friends gives you compact and concise updates from the accounts whose tweets you want to see the most. A great tool for spotlighting certain users.
31. TweetDeck: With TweetDeck you can manage multiple Twitter accounts in one place. Mark tweets as read, manage your lists, follows and messages efficiently, and see everything in a great deck-like interface. It’s a win-win-win.
32. Twitteriffic: For starters, this iOS app blocks promoted tweets and ads from your feed. At the same time, it lets you mute certain accounts. It is great for keeping your Twitter account focused.
33. YoruFukurou: If you have a Mac and don’t want to head to the browser to see your Twitter feed, this application is a great option. It doesn’t have the bells and whistles, but the clean and light interface adds to its charm.
Category 7: Media Creation Tools
34. Stencil: With over two million royalty-free photos, Stencil gives its users the ability to create unique graphics for Twitter. It is a great tool for small businesses who want to create engaging content on Twitter.
35. Canva: A great graphic design tool for just about any platform. But its dimension selection features let you design graphics specifically for Twitter.
36. Pablo: A very easy to use graphic design tool from Buffer, Pablo lets you design graphics for and share them directly to Twitter. All from within its own website. It is especially great for designing quotes with visuals.
Category 8: Automation Tools
37. HootSuite: With HootSuite, employees from your small business can design, collaborate, and run feedback on tweets, before you eventually schedule their release. Its inclusion of apps such as Adobe Stock is definitely a plus.
38. Buffer: Great for scheduling tweets. Along with its scheduling app, Buffer provides a wide variety of other tools (such as Pablo) that make it easy to create for social media.
39. Sprout Social: An all-around social media tool that lets you schedule tweets, as well as analyze their performance and learn what kind of content is trending in the market.
40. Dlvr.it: An automation tool for multiple social media platforms, you can connect multiple social media accounts, RSS feeds, and, best of all, turn on Twitter auto-posting so that you can focus on other parts of your small business.
Category 9: Hashtag Tools
41. Hashtagify: At its barebones, this Twitter tool lets you analyze the impact of a certain hashtag and look for related tags. However, arguably its most impressive feature is its ability to recommend the best hashtags for a topic of your choice.
42. RiteTag: Very simple to use. Upload an image, or type a text. That’s it. RiteTag will recommend appropriate hashtags that you can use with your tweet, based on live engagement.
43. Keyhole: While it is an analytics brand, one of Keyhole’s most unique offerings is its Hashtag Analytics. The product tells you how impactful your hashtag of choice has been, down to calculating its return on investment.
Category 10: Alert And Monitoring Tools
44. One Million Tweet Map: This tool uses a map to display where the keyword or hashtag of your choice is being tweeted at, live. This is great for a small business that wants to monitor the geographical impact of their campaign.
45. Mention: Mention allows you to monitor conversations relevant to your brand, be they topics your small business is interested in, or something related to your competitors. The insights it provides make it easy to create social media strategies.
46. Warble: Warble sends you free once-a-day alerts for things that you want it to. This can include mentions, relevant hashtags, and phrases, among other things.
47. Twilert: Twilert is an all-in-one Twitter tracker that can help your small business monitor competitors and gain insights. However, it also functions as a brilliant alert app and sends scheduled or live alerts (based on your preference) so that your small business can stay ahead of the queue for relevant conversations and opportunities.
48. Mentionmapp: If your small business has ever worked with influencers on Twitter, this is a great tool to measure their impact. Much like Bluenod, this tool creates a visual map, which is easy to understand. This map, however, shows you who’s driving certain conversations around your brand and the kind of reach they have.
Category 11: All Other Tools
49. Tweet Topic Explorer: A handy tool that shows you the most used words on a Twitter account of your choosing. It further groups words that are used together. It is great when combined with other tools to analyze the language your small business’s competitors are using.
50. Listen To Twitter: A great tool for analyzing the sentiments around your small business. This application creates a list of emojis, positive and negative tweets, and a running mood graph about a certain topic. If you really want to know how the Twitter public feels about your brand, this is an excellent tool.
51. Tagboard: An all-out production tool that helps you create stories for your social media. From hashtag – related work to managing videos and images, this tool has it all.
52. Twitter Live/ Periscope/ Twitch: If you want to live-stream something on your Twitter, these tools have your back. The first one is even built into Twitter, so using it is easy peasy.
53. Zapier And IFTTT: Not Twitter tools, but overall integration tools. Both of these tools try to make everything just work together and as seamlessly as possible. You can integrate YouTube videos and Blogger blog posts to Twitter, which makes content creation loads easier.
54. Little Pork Chop: Little Pork Chop lets you maintain your train of thought by chopping up your words into a stream that adheres to the Twitter word limit.
55. Twitter Bookmarks: This is a wonderful iOS app that lets you ‘bookmark’ interesting things on Twitter so that you can come back to them later. This is great for small businesses who retweet quite a bit on Twitter.
56. GroupTweet: The tool puts your small business’s Twitter account into the hands of multiple employees so that they can all add to the content.
57. Bedazzle: Bedazzle your followers and customers by embellishing your tweet’s text with different fonts and spacings.
58. Ctrlq/ Who Tweeted It First: If you ever want to find out who started a trend, a movement, or a hashtag on Twitter, this tool is it. This is extremely useful if you want to track down influencers who have the ability to create viral content.
59. CoSchedule’s Click To Tweet: CoSchedule has a plethora of great marketing tools for small businesses. This one is also phenomenal. With this tool, you can add ‘Click To Tweet’ boxes on your website or blog, which will make it very easy for viewers to tweet your content.
60. Pullquote: With this Chrome extension, you can turn any text you come across into a tweetable quote. Tools like this making engaging your followers seem like no task, at all.
Conclusion
There are various ways to take your small business online marketing to the next level. The internet is both the world’s largest encyclopedia and the world’s greatest collective.
You can learn all you want from the internet and use it almost instantaneously. This article can serve as a great jumping point for you to start experimenting with your online marketing plan.
Use some of these and let us know what you think!