It can be quite frustrating for a sole trader or small business owner to manage so many social medial accounts. The trouble is that keeping up with all your social media is a necessary task that any entrepreneur or start-up business needs to do if they want to establish their brand and get themselves known.
Time is a precious commodity within any business, and making good use of applications such as Tweetdeck and HootSuite can go a long way to help make the best use of your time. However, with the rise in popularity of curation tools in recent years, the likes of Rebel Mouse are quickly coming to the forefront.
Rebel Mouse has an interesting history in itself, being the brainchild of Paul Berry, a former Huffington Post CTO. His vision was to create a new form of social media by presenting a ‘front page’ to show people who you are, not unlike looking at a virtual newspaper.
Most people are very visual in the way they take on information, and this is why sites such as Pinterest, Flipboard and PaperLi have become so popular. If you understand and like the way these sites work, then you will completely get Rebel Mouse too.
With this application you can integrate all your social media posts across all your platforms into one visual grid-like feed. You also have a certain amount of flexibility with the presentation, as you can manually re-arrange the information to suit your own visual tastes, or you can leave the programme to automatically organize your feed if you cannot spare the time.
If you can spare the time to customise your front page, then you can tailor it in a particular style or layout that would suit your readership, you can brand it, re-arrange it, edit headlines and give it a certain recognisable look that would become familiar and pleasing to your followers.
This application also has a very handy analytical tool inbuilt that will show you what is popular within your feed, and can be a great help with your marketing efforts so you can customise your information further to better provide information that your followers are more interested in reading.
As with most social media management and curation tools, there are different levels of service on offer. Depending on your marketing budget and the size of your business, you can choose what level of service you need to take up rather than trying to tackle a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach that may not suit your particular marketing needs.
For your information, here is a short breakdown of how you can best utilise Rebel Mouse for your small business:
Connect all your social media accounts
An eye-catching web page, or digital news page, will be created using your most recent shared content
Use it to aggregate your own stories and showcase your own products or services
Reuse your twitter posts or event hashtag to create a page to share with non-twitter using followers
Mix your own posts with curated information from others on a trending subject
collect tweets from a trending hashtag and compile them into a draft copy to be approved before appearing on your page
Design a strong visual social dashboard for your company using photos and video links from your social media activity
All in all it is a visually pleasing way to present or re-use your social media activity in a positive way, that can fully automated and tailored to suit your needs. If something big is happening with your company or business sector, then you can curate and deliver a big story as it unfolds to all your engaged followers.
Rebel Mouse is a great opportunity that any sole trader, entrepreneur, start-up, and small business should harness to enhance their online presence in a very visually dynamic way.
