Twelve Social Media Tool Gifts of Christmas for Small Businesses That Want To Share Their Brand Story Online (Part 1)
December is not the easiest month to get your voice heard on the market. Especially for small businesses who can’t afford to hire a Santa Claus or a sexy elf for their Christmas-spirit promotion.
There is simply too much festive noise coming from all brands that want to attract customers for their holiday shopping overindulgence.
Still, if you’re equipped with an authentic and engaging brand narrative, and some useful social media tools, you can get your story noticed, even in a busy marketplace.
That’s why you don’t need to wait for Christmas to give your business the gift of social media tools — and learn how to make the best of the automation they offer. After all, they’re out there so that you can share your brand’s story in the most effective way.
Choosing among the myriad of tools can be tough — especially if you’re new to social media. To help you out in the process, here is the first batch of Edgar’s 12 social media tool gifts that are truly useful for your brand’s storytelling goals.
On the first day of Christmas…
To spread your brand’s compelling story, you need to know what your target audience is and how to reach it.
Followerwonk gives you the possibility to search for relevant keywords in Twitter profiles and bios, so that you can pinpoint the right people for your message. You can follow the users directly from the search results.
The tool also provides you with insight on what is the reply ratio of users and how often they retweet posts, which can influence your decision whom to target. Once you’ve identified them, you can easily compile lists of contacts of influencers and more specific audiences in Twitter to whom you can spread the word about your brand.
On the second day of Christmas…
The key to be a good storyteller is to be a good listener. And with all the noise out here, you need help to actually hear what really interests your listeners, so that you can tell your story from the right perspective. So social listening is indispensable if you want to grab your audience’s eyes and ears.
Hootsuite gives you the platform to inform yourself about your audience’s interest, your competitors’ activity and the most important trends out there. You can also engage with users from all your channels. And you do all of that using just one tab — because everything fits on your screen.
Bonus part: you can get reports on your social media outreach efforts too. So all in all, it’s a comprehensive tool that will serve you for researching your buyer personae and content marketing approach.
On the third day of Christmas…
To complement social listening, make sure you employ the power of surveys, too. In this way, you can gather relevant data directly from the source, namely, your customers.
We all know how difficult it can be to get solid survey results. Often people find them boring and just skip them. So preparing a pretty survey with cool user experience and integrated visuals can be of great help to get higher response rates. That’s precisely what Typeform gives you (and for free!).
On the fourth day of Christmas…
Buzzsumo is another great tool to assist your social listening efforts. You can search and analyze the best performing topics or domains in order to get inspired for your own storytelling content. On top, you are able to also check how a piece of content you produced earlier is performing and how popular it is.
The tool also gives you the possibility to find the most important influencers in your field, so that you can create relationships with them and have them promote your relevant content.
On the fifth day of Christmas…
Once you know whom you’re talking to, how you should talk to them and about what, it’s time to find the best relevant content online and to create awesome original content yourself.
And here comes Buffer to help you share all of this greatness. The tool allows you to schedule your social media updates across a few channels. You can load your whole content curation list for the week at once, thus making your curation efforts more organized. Then your storytelling through relevant external resources becomes super-easy and consistent.
You can also add the perfect times for posting your original content, so that it gets the most attention from users. With Buffer, scheduling the same post multiple times is seamless. You can later analyze the best-performing updates and apply the knowledge afterwards through testing and iterating.
On the sixth day of Christmas…
Besides reaping the benefits of social media sharing, don’t forget that regular (but not spammy) newsletters can be a great method to reach out to people.
ExactTarget’s email marketing solution gives you the perfect tool for your brand newsletter. You can manage millions of emails and create personalized customer journeys. Plus, you can automate the messages you need repetitively to save time, yet they still can be customized. The tool is packed with a lot of advanced features, so you can do things like target your audiences, streamline your email replies and track and optimize your email campaigns.
Edgar is in Christmas mood
Hope you’ve enjoyed the first six great social media tool gifts — and that you’ll find them useful for your small business. Stay tuned for the next six, coming right up!
And, of course, in the meantime, if you need a hand in discovering and sharing your brand story, Edgar the storyteller is here.
