Top Social Media Tools for Business

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

#10. Monitter As an entrepreneur, you need to know what people are saying about your company as well as your competitors. Monitter.com a service that monitors Twitter “mentions” in real-time in a multi-column interface reminiscent of TweetDeck. Simply input a search term into a column, add or remove columns as desired, and get an automatically-refreshing picture of what people are saying about your brand or competing brands in your space.

#9. YouTube Everyone has heard about YouTube, but have you thought about how it could help your business? Could your product benefit from an awesome video walk-through? Could your marketing strategy include a “viral” video strategy that gets you lots of exposure at relatively low cost? And now with YouTube’s promoted-videos-adsense on the web, there’s even more incentive to think about leveraging social video as a brand exposure tool. If you can create interesting content that’s relevant to your brand or products, a positive visual association with your company can attract new interest, build company culture, turn inquiries into sales, & give back significant brand dividends over time. The most obvious and frequent business use of YouTube is for marketing and advertising, but don’t overlook other ways in which your company can leverage YouTube. Visual walk-throughs & FAQs can be a great boon to customer service. Videos of you & your team giving public presentations, speaking at conferences or engaging with the media can establish & enhance your company’s reputation as a idea leader. And don’t forget the utility of private videos for use in executive & new employee trainings + recording company events.

#8. UserVoice As a small business, it’s hard to juggle building and improving your products with supporting what’s already out there. That’s where UserVoice.com can help. From bug reports to feature requests, UserVoice can help track & manage the feedback of your users & customers. Not only does it assure your User-base that you care about what they have to say, but it can potentially leverage the best suggestions from the people who are actually using your tool or service. Since users can vote on the ideas of other users, you can start to get a picture of the most-requested features & fixes for your app or service to feed back into your products’ lifecycles. You can also use UserVoice to get feedback on a limited release or beta version of a product by using UserVoice FAQ or forums. You can send invites to specific email addresses, or limit your feedback to company-wide participants by restricting access by email domain.

[ Next Tools: MailChimp, GetSatisfaction, Twitter, Facebook – in Premium Content ]