Top 4 Social Media Tools for Business #3

from Mashable.com 10/09 enhanced by Peter/CXO Wiz4biz 9/13

4. Facebook is the other social networking giant you’ll want to be sure your business has a presence on. It’s another powerful tool for building relationships, raising visibility for your brand, and targeting your customer niche. With a robust and relatively low-cost Advertizing, you can connect directly to the potential customers or clients who might want to know about you. Optimization tools help you fine-tune & target your ads more intelligently, and get detailed insight into who is responding to your ads.
Pro Tip: Authenticity is key here too – for maximum impact. With changes that made Facebook Pages more like personal pages, your brand’s home on Facebook is no longer relegated to fairly static profile information. Since the Wall Feed is usually the main point of entry for your fans & visitors, think of it as an opportunity to provide some sort of utility to your visitors, whether it be information, entertainment, or relevant expressions of your company’s culture and mission.

3. BaseCamp If you’re like most startups, you’ve got a heck of a lot going on. You need to keep on top of your projects & open loops, not just internally but with your clients, partners, & customers as well. That’s where a good project management tool comes in. BaseCamp from 37signals is a great and cost-effective web-based tool for project management & collaboration. Featuring To Do Lists, milestones for important due-dates, file sharing, blog-style messaging, wiki-style writeboards, time tracking, & integration with the excellent group chat product. Basic plans for small businesses start at $24 a month.
Pro Tip: Add extra functionality to your BaseCamp environment or integrate it with your existing systems in the Extra’s department.

2. LinkedIn. From hiring to networking with cohorts & potential clients to participating in groups & question threads, LinkedIn is a powerful social network for entrepreneurs & business professionals of all kinds. It’s a great place to both discover & research potential job candidates (with a big advandage over Facebook or Twitter), as well as both keeping up with & extending your network.
Pro Tip: Although it’s not an overnight success solution, positioning yourself as an expert in the LinkedIn Answers domain(s) relevant to your business can be a great way to increase your authority and drive new interest to your business. Don’t underestimate the power of asking for advice here as well.

1. Google Apps for Domains. Startup costs for outfitting an office with networking & computing equipment are staggering enough as it is without even taking into account the software & maintenance components. One area for adventurous entrepreneurs to cut costs in the latter department lies in the realm of typical office staples: Email, calendaring & the office suites businesses typically need to use to prepare documents, spreadsheets & presentations. Instead of paying an IT staff to set up, host & maintain your own mail servers, Google/ Apps can handle custom email addresses at your own company’s URL. As an alternative to Microsoft Outlook worth considering, Gmail also integrates nicely with Google Calendar for your group calendaring needs. And whereas once Microsoft Office was one of your only choices in the office suites department, Google Documents now handles document, spreadsheet & presentation preparation with ease — all the while making it also easy to share & collaborate with colleagues without having to Email documents around or check items out of a central repository.
Pro Tip: For the truly frugal, you can even opt for the totally free Standard Edition which includes basic Gmail, Calendaring, Google Docs and Google Sites. Premier Edition will run you $50 per user per year, but increases user Email storage to 25GB, adds more security features and guarantees you uptime and support.

Your Comments on the effectiveness of some of these Social Media will be appreciated.