Week 12 - Other Social Media Tools

Have enough social media yet? Let me place the fire hose right up to your face and turn it on full blast.

There are multiple different social media tools out there that are all trying to ride the coat tails of how powerful social media is. Some have been around for a while but are less used. Some just came about and have seen some success. Others go after a targeted market and smaller community. But the point is that there are an endless amount of social media tools that you can use for your small business. Here are a few that you can consider.

Google Plus 

Google plus (aka the ugly child of the big social media companies) is one of the most under utilized social media platforms out there that has mass similar to that of Facebook and Twitter. Powered by Google, anyone who has a gmail account automatically generates a Google plus page. Therefore, the site boasts to have over 500 million active users and accounts. 

Check out my personal Google Plus page, along with the business google plus page for my company, Social Publishing House. 

Google On Air

Also, since we are talking about Google Plus, this platform has an incredibly useful feature that will help increase your online platform and visibility on search engines. Its called "Google On Air", which is akin to Skype but functions more like an online webinar that will be filed under your YouTube channel. You can embed it into a blog post, promote it to have people attend and watch, and now have a steady stream of YouTube videos you can use to promote your business. 

Here's an example of a video I did with one of the contest winners for the writing contest that I held. 

HootSuite

Now that the fire hose is going, trying to keep tabs on all of those social media profiles can become a tremendous amount of work. HootSuite is one of the more useful tools for linking all your social media to one platform and managing it. You can also schedule posts in advance, keep tabs on key words and hashtags, and do all of your communication from one screen. If you use more than three social media platforms for your business, you need to try this out. 

Google Drive

As you can see, I'm a big proponent of using Google products. Google Drive is one of those things thats not necessarily social media specific, however the programs that you can use within it can make managing and plugging content into social media much easier than how it used to happen. 

Google Drive is whats called "Cloud Based Software", which stores all your documents on a server instead of on your actual computer. From there, you can access it from any device you have. Others can access those documents and work on them as well, saving their work every 15 seconds. Multiple people can work on them at the same time. 

Gone are the days when you have to email documents back and forth, worry about version control, or losing your work. If you use this for social media, you can create pictures, blog posts, plans, editorial calendars, and just about anything under the sun you would need to manage your social media and online platform. 

Give it a shot.