7 Social Media and Marketing Tools for SMEs

In a global market dominated by large corporations and empowered customers, small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) are constantly trying to find new ways to stand out in the crowd and engage with their clients. Social media is a powerful branding tool and it’s essential to use it in the marketing mix. However, most SME managers say they lack time and knowledge to invest in social media.

A global study conducted by SAP Global SME and Oxford Economics on 2,300 SME executives across 23 countries, revealed that 31 percent of the respondents noted that that social media has helped drive better customer service and strengthen customer relationships. Moreover, 25 percent cited improved product and service development with social media.

Using the best tools, social media can give companies a competitive advantage. In more than 5 years of social media marketing, our strong team has tested hundreds of online marketing tools available for SMEs and selected the best ones for small to mid-sized businesses. Here’s our list:

1. Marketing Grader is a great marketing tool that will help you manage your website and blog. It also provides actionable insights and suggestions to improve your marketing.
2. Hootsuite is a content management platform. The tool allows you to manage multiple social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Wordpress from one dashboard. With Hootsuite you can schedule social updates, interact with those who reply to your content and track your favorite topics and hashtags.
3. Social Mention is one of the best free web-based application that lets you search popular channels such as blogs, microblogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos and more. It has a user-friendly interface, so users just have to type the name of the brand, company, product or any topic across the web  they want to track and measure in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media channels.
4. Bit.ly is a well-known URL shortener. It makes it very easy to share links and track them by adding a “+” at the end of the shortened URL. It also lets you know how many users clicked you link, the top referrers and the click’s location.
5. MailChimp is a great email marketing tool that helps you create, send and track email newsletters. MailChimp has features and integrations that will suit your email-marketing needs. Its mobile features allow you to view your email campaign stats, see who is tweeting about you and manage your lists and subscribers from your mobile device.
6. Radian6 is one of the best tools for B2B marketers. It can be used for monitoring social media channels, forums and communities, but also for lead generation. You can identify and analyze conversations and opinions about your company, products and competitors with the leading social media monitoring and engagement tools.
7. Klout is one of the first social influence measurement tools on the web. It uses Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Wikipedia, and Instagram data to create Klout user profiles that are assigned a unique ‘Klout Score’. This Klout Score is a number between one and100, with the higher the score, the more influential the user.

These are our seven favorite social media and marketing tools! Let us know what tools and services you use in a comment!