Infographic courtesy of SumAll
Social media marketing and analytic tool for your small business
We all want to get better at growing our business online, and social media engagement now plays a big part in our growth.
Running a small business can put a real strain on your time, especially if you have a small team in place that are doing many different jobs within your company.
Are you engaging your followers?
You may well be diligently posting to Facebook and sending out regular tweets. You may even have scheduled some regular time each day dedicated to replying to followers and answering customer queries you get through your social media pages. But do you really know how to figure out how much site traffic all your activity is generating?
Do you actually know which product or service that you supply is selling the most or attracting the greatest interest through social media?
Do you know if you are successfully engaging with your customers on all platforms, or just through one or two of them?
Do you have time to find out?
Through the free analytical tools now offered on social media sites, you can see the results of your activity, and the figures can prove invaluable for when you are trying to maximise your your reach while keeping good time-management in mind.
The only trouble is, searching out the analytical date from each of your social media sites can be very time-consuming. Do you have the time to go to each of your different sites and drill down for information?
What if you could get some free help?
Wouldn’t it be good if there was a free tool out there that could do all this research for you? I thought so too, and that is why I went for a snoop around the internet in search of free social media curation tools that actually offer a good level of free tools, and that were not too difficult to understand or use.
One tool I came across is called SumAll, and it looked really interesting, so I took it for a spin.
This is actually quite a comprehensive tool that is geared up to save time for small businesses and digital marketers. They have a catchy mission statement that although very American in taste, is actually quite true, “unlock and democratize data for everyone”.
Basically SumAll gathers all of your analytical date from each of your social media platforms that you operate on. However, when I signed up for it I couldn’t see Pinterest on the selection wall. This could be a drawback for creative companies or businesses with very visual products, such as fashion, jewellery, art and sculpture etc.
Signing up was not confusing
The signing up process was nice and easy, and they certainly don’t over complicate things. It was easy for me to connect to and plug-in my social pages, and even on Facebook where I have 3 different pages as well as my personal page, you can pick and choose which pages you want to include for your data searches.
I really liked how I could set up a ‘Throwback Thursday’ option right from the sign-up process where your most popular tweet and post of the week gets automatically re-posted for you the following Thursday. You can also tick the option for an automatic thank-you to be sent to your busiest followers.
Obviously the best thing about SumAll is that it save you time. You will no longer need to separately check your statistics on each site, and you will have all your stats displayed in handy visual graphs that are easy to read and understand.
Find out what is working, and what is not
You can check up on your daily activity to see what is working for you, and what may not be working so well. It could be something as simple as timing where your posts are not being read during quiet times of the day, or even specific days of the week where your posts are going unread more often.
There are 48 platforms that SumAll support, so you should be able to link up all your sites, apart from Pinterest as I mentioned earlier, but they may include this in due course. With over 32,000 registered users on board, this is certainly proving to be a great tool for small businesses.
Is it really free?
Yes, some of it is free and some aspects you do have to pay for, but the free tools on offer are really useful, and many small businesses and entrepreneurs may not need to pay for any extra services.
The paid for services are very tempting, and would be good to add when your business grows to a size where you may be employing someone solely to handle your social media marketing. You can take a more hands-off approach but still be able to get mobile alerts sent directly to your phone.
Overall, this service is really handy for small business owners, and the free tools on offer are geared to help you manage your social media impact more efficiently.
