Send Social Media does everything Hootsuite does, but significantly better in addition to other features Hootsuite simply doesn’t offer.

1. Schedule posts to over 30+ social networks – not just 5 Schedule and posts tweets, Foursquare shouts and venue tips, LinkedIn status updates, LinkedIn Group posts, personal messages, as well as WordPress (self-hosted), WordPress.com, Blogger, Posterous and Tumblr blogs, Pinterest pins, Instagram, Flickr albums, Email Newsletters and even SMS/text messages. That’s just scratching the surface as you can add over 30+ more social networks.

2. Better Analytics, analyze every post, click, share & comment while also checking your Klout score Track just about everything including clicks, referrers, shares, comments, views and more. Track every piece of content you distribute, making it easy to measure the success of your campaigns. You can even add your Google Analytics code. Get reports on various metrics including fans/followers over time, engagement, klout, sentiment and more.

3. Better Monitoring, track and easily respond to your Yelp and City search reviews Monitor what’s being said about your brand on blogs, news, social networks and in comments. Your sentiment analysis highlights which mentions you should respond to. You can also review your latest Yelp and CitySearch reviews so you can respond right away.

4. Customer Database included letting you engage with them all easily Access all your social, email and mobile contacts in a single, unified address book. Import your contacts from all the services you use including Gmail and LinkedIn. Create profiles and groups for each contact you import, allowing you to reach them on whichever platform you choose.

5. Unlimited Collaboration Tools to manage multiple users and clients Manage accounts for multiple clients and/or contributors while creating logins allowing them to manage things themselves. Create user hierarchies and manage permissions. This is a great solution for agencies needing to manage multiple client accounts and perfect for businesses with small teams. Your users have the option to log in and manage things themselves or you can manage everything for them.

6. A better calendar style layout that actually lets you see your scheduled posts overall Have a true calendar layout to easily view all your scheduled posts for editing. Access the interactive drag-and-drop calendar to easily plan your message schedule.

7. Now you can send 160-character SMS texts to any network in the world Send customers promotional codes and announcements about deals and sales or integrate SMS into your own applications. Sending an SMS text is as simple as typing your message and deciding where to send it. Add a sign-up widget to your website to gather new mobile numbers and potential customers.

8. Manage all your social streams from a single inbox Like, Comment, Share and Delete posts in your stream from services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Easily manage your Twitter stream, lists, search terms and followers. View detailed information about anyone on Twitter, including Klout scores and influencers. Keep track of mentions, search terms, retweets and more.

9. All the Twitter Features you love and more! Manage and track all your Twitter profiles in one place. Read and respond to your Twitter stream in real-time or schedule tweets to go out later. Setup auto-responders, auto-follow and unfollow keyword targeted users and more

When Apple was starting to gain momentum as a company, one of the main criticisms it faced was that there weren’t enough offerings for businesses. While Apple had all sorts of awesome programs for creative individuals, their software solutions for business settings weren’t nearly as robust. However, as Apple has continued to grow and has successfully expanded into new markets, this has been something they’ve directly addressed. Not only has the company itself prioritized multiple business initiatives, but the developer-driven nature of the iOS ecosystem means that numerous iPhone and iPad apps have been developed specifically for businesses to use.

One of the great things about the iOS ecosystem empowering developers outside of Apple to create apps is that these talented individuals and teams are able to create apps for all kinds of purposes. In addition to general business apps, many apps have been created for specific industries. For example, as iPads have continued to become more popular in the medical field, plenty of app developers have used their domain expertise to develop apps that are very useful for medical professionals like nurses and doctors.

Since there’s no question that there are many apps which can help businesses be more productive and even save money, we want to bring five of the best business iOS apps to your attention:

Evernote

If you’re looking for the best way for your entire team to keep its information organized and easily shareable with each other, Evernote is the app that every member of your business should have on their iOS devices.

GoToMeeting

While most business owners have heard of this software, many aren’t aware that it’s available on iOS devices. That availability means you can stay on top of your meetings without necessarily being tied to your office all day.

Microsoft Remote Desktop

Looking for a way to access your desktop when you’re away from the office? With the Microsoft Remote Desktop, you can quickly access your desktop computer from your iPad or even your iPhone. This can be a lifesaver when you find yourself in need of a file or program that hasn’t been put in the cloud yet.

Square

If your business is tired of paying a small fortune to process credit card payments, you should look into Square. By attaching a simple dongle to an iPhone or iPad, Square provides a way to securely process payments for a much smaller fee than traditional processors.

Microsoft Office

Although there was a time when Apple fans would have never imagined using a Microsoft product, those days are long gone. Because Microsoft is still the leader in word processing and spreadsheets, it’s great that a very compelling Microsoft Office experience is available on iOS.

By taking advantage of all the features offered by quality iPhone and iPad apps, businesses can find new ways to work which increase their overall efficiency.

Whether your primary goal is to increase brand awareness or generate leads, social media can be a great channel for helping your business to grow. While social media is a very powerful tool, it does come with some challenges. One of the most common challenges that businesses face is trying to stay on top of their activity across multiple social media sites.

If you’re currently in this position, you’re probably in search of a way to streamline your social media efforts. Since you’re definitely not alone in facing this challenge, you’ll be happy to know that we created a social media dashboard specifically for businesses just like yours.

Because we created our dashboard around this very common problem, we want to cover the different ways that it can directly help your business:

Evaluate Your True Progress

Without centralized tracking, it’s often hard to pinpoint exactly how well your social media efforts are going. While you may have a general idea, trying to compile exact numbers can be very difficult. One of the great things about a dashboard is it pulls all this data into one place for you. By being able to easily look at all of your data, you’ll be able to evaluate how well your business is doing with social and make very informed decisions.

Get All Team Members on the Same Page

Social media is something that works best when all team members are contributing. However, if different team members aren’t exactly sure what others are doing, it can be hard to make this work. What’s great about having a dashboard is members of your team won’t feel like they’re in the dark. Instead, everyone will have a way to stay in sync and coordinate their efforts with each other.

Focus on Specific Initiatives

While there are definitely things that businesses can do to help give specific pieces of content a big dose of vitality, sustainable social media success isn’t generally something that happens overnight. Instead, it results from consistent efforts. That being said, there are going to be times when you want to focus on a specific initiative via social. And with our advanced social media management dashboard, you’ll have all the data you need from that initiative at your fingertips.

Figure Out What Works

In addition to consistency, momentum plays a big role in building a strong social presence. One of the best ways to increase social media posting momentum is by knowing what resonates with your audience. By looking at social media analytics through our dashboard, you’ll be able to see what’s working best and tailor your future content efforts accordingly.

For a social media dashboard that offers all of the above features and many more, be sure to take a look at Send Social Media. Since there’s so much that your business can gain from a social media dashboard, we highly encourage you to try ours out via a 14-day free trial.

Branding is a very broad topic. For some people, visual design is the first thing that comes to mind.

Others, they may view branding with a slightly negative connotation and believe it’s too abstract. While those are all valid thoughts, the right type of branding can be very important for a business. When done correctly, branding helps to define a small business and gives people a reason to connect with it.

One of the ways to move away from the abstractness sometimes associated with branding and focus more on what it can actually do for your business is to look at its most important elements. That’s why we want to cover the essential ingredients to build a brand for your small business:

What’s Your Purpose?

Building a brand starts with defining why your business exists. On the surface, this may seem like a simple question to answer. But as you dig into it, you’ll likely notice that it’s surprisingly complex. Although it can take some time to get a clear and concise answer to this question, doing so will create the foundation for the rest of your branding efforts.

Staying Consistent

A brand is something that makes a promise. The specific promise will vary from one business to the next. Regardless of the specific promise your business makes with its brand, what’s extremely important is to stay consistent with that promise. In terms of how to do that, it’s something that needs to happen at every level of your business. From how you provide customer service to the visual elements you use across social media for your business, staying consistent will build the type of trust that your business needs in order to grow and thrive.

Involving Employees

Since purpose and consistency are key ingredients of a small business brand, it’s easy to understand why branding isn’t an activity that exists in a silo. For a brand to really mean something, every member of an organization needs to be involved. Another benefit of getting every employee fully on board with your brand is it will help you spread its message.

Building Loyalty

Employees aren’t the only ones who can spread the message of your brand. If you identify your purpose and create an organization where everyone consistently shares that message, you’ll gain loyal customers. These customers will act as evangelists for your brand and help grow it to levels via channels like word of mouth that you could have never done on your own.

Social media continues to be a very important part of building a small business brand. While staying on top of social media can seem quite challenging at times, there are ways to make it easier. Learn more about Send Social Media and how our tool will help streamline your social media efforts.

Consistency is one of the most important elements for a business to find success with social media marketing. Far too many businesses give up on social media channels before they have a chance to gain real traction. One reason that it’s so common for businesses to give up is they feel like these activities are taking up too much time and not delivering enough returns. Plenty of businesses simply don’t have the team resources needed to stay on top of social media on a daily basis.
If these kinds of issues sound familiar, your business is in the perfect position to harness the power of social media automation. When done correctly, this type of automation can keep your social media efforts running on a consistent schedule. It will also free you and any members of your team up to actually have time for engaging with people through social media. So if you want to get on top of social media marketing for your business and avoid feeling like you’re stuck on a hamster wheel, here are a few tips for getting started with automation:
Keep It Human
While the right social media automation tools will allow you to do more in less time, that doesn’t mean you want the content you share to seem impersonal. Businesses that aren’t afraid to show the true personalities of their brands and team members always do the best on social.
Tailor Content to Different Social Channels
A common mistake that businesses of all sizes make is taking the exact same content and sharing it across all of their social media profiles. The reason this is a mistake is every social network has its own culture. So if you share the exact same content with duplicate descriptions across all your social profiles, it’s not going to resonate nearly as well. Taking time to customize what you’re sharing to different social channels can make a big difference in how well it performs.
Be a Curator
Another mistake many businesses make is only sharing their own content. By going beyond this scope and curating a wide range of content your followers will find interesting, you’ll be able to make your profiles much more engaging.
Regularly Review Stats
The best way to know what kind of content to share more of and what to avoid is to review your performance stats on a regular basis. Having this information will guide the focus for your social media automation strategy.
If you want to use a tool that’s specifically designed to make social media automation as simple and effective as possible, take a look at all the great features of Send Social Media.

Social media has become an integral part of the work that many agencies do. One of the challenges that agencies often face as they grow is being able to keep up with posting for all clients across multiple platforms. Because this is something that’s obviously too time-consuming to manage manually and is actually too demanding for many social media tools, it’s vital to find a tool that’s built for the specific needs of an agency. Here are the types of features that are essential for a social media management tool used by agencies:

Bulk Scheduling

Not having this feature is a deal breaker. When you want to work on social media content for a client, it’s important for a member of your team to be able to sit down and fill up a queue with lots of posts. Not only is this essential for the sake of efficiency, but it’s also very important for being able to take a strategic approach to social media posting. By choosing a tool that makes it a breeze to queue up plenty of posts, an agency will be able to keep the social profiles active for all its clients without feeling constantly overwhelmed.

Email Integration

Although social media has become an absolutely essential part of online marketing, it hasn’t eliminated email. In fact, as more activity has moved out of people’s inboxes, being able to communicate through this channel is arguably more valuable than ever. That’s why the best agencies know that integrating email into the marketing efforts for their clients is a must. With the right tool, you can easily manage this type of activity. Having this ability is great for using social media as a lead generation tool and then converting those leads into customers.

Ability to Respond

Regardless of the specific platform, social media activity is driven by engagement. If people try to communicate with a profile and never get a response, they’re going to lose interest. Since many agencies handle this type of interaction for their clients, having a tool that pulls all messages into one location and then makes it easy to respond is incredibly useful.

Detailed Analytics

Without analytics, it’s very difficult to know what’s working and what isn’t working as well. With a social media management tool that offers detailed analytics, you’ll be able to use this data for the agency, as well as easily share it with clients on a regular basis.

If you want a social media management tool that you can count on to handle all of your agency’s daily needs, be sure to take a product tour of Send Social Media

It should go without saying that your business is on social media, but which platforms are the most effective? That really depends on your business and your target market, but there are a few things that will apply to any of you crazy entrepreneurs and your online shenanigans. One thing that should apply to everyone right now for the foreseeable future is getting engaged on Pinterest. Learn why your business should be on Pinterest:

It’s Hot
Riding trends is not the most desirable way to run a business for everyone, but taking advantage of existing markets of potential customers is always smart. In other words, when you’ve got a handful of doodads to sell, what’s more effective, taking out an ad somewhere for “doodads for sale” or walking down to the flea market and unloading them in an hour or two?

Pinterest is seeing meteoric growth in the last 6 months, and they haven’t come close to plateauing yet, so you should definitely be browsing the site and mingling as a business. There are too many people there right now. If you are ignoring where people are gathering, you are missing out.

It’s Measurable
Just like any other social media endeavors, a good set of social media software tools can track and assess your engagement and effectiveness on the site. Lots of people + knowing how you are viewed and received there = good analytics for developing a strategy. Any time you can be involved with a large group of consumers and measure that involvement, you can find profit potential somehow.

It’s the Right Crowd
The majority of Pinners on Pinterest are late twenties to mid forties women. Guess who the largest group of consumers is? You got it. Not only is it a huge group of people, it’s a huge group of people who buy things. You are not only engaging people here, you are engaging the people who statistically are the most likely to become a customer. Like shooting fish in a barrel.

It’s Different
The thing that sets Pinterest apart other than its demographic is the style of the platform. While every other social site is primarily text with visual and audio mixed in, Pinterest turns the tables by making the visual aspect the primary focus and the text secondary. This makes it different enough to withstand competition from other social sites. Pinners are likely to also be Facebookers, Tweeters, or Plussers, because the sites are different enough to avoid too much overlap in substance. Any new upstart could always turn out to be a flash in the pan, but Pinterest likely has good staying power.

It’s finally here! We’re excited to announce the full release of Send Social Media’s Pinterest Service. This much requested feature has now been added to your dashboard.

Pinterest is an image sharing site, where users post their interests (pins) often linked to a website to designated pages (boards).

With over 70+ Million active users this is prime social retail space to showcase your business.

This update enables you to:
–    Post/schedule pins to specific boards
–    Retrieve detailed analytics from your reporting dashboard
Pinterest is an image sharing site, where users post their interests (pins) often linked to a website to designated pages (boards).

Adding the Service:

Head over to:
Add/ Edit Services > Social > Pinterest > Add

You will need two bits of information:

• – The board URL that you would like to post to. (You will have to own it or have posting permissions to it)
  http://www.pinterest.com/myusername/myboardname
• – Your Pinterest login details.

Posting/Scheduling:

You HAVE options:

1)    Attach as a link Preview

2)    Upload a Photo with a link

3)    Attach a YouTube or Vimeo Video

Option 1

• – Select your Service from the compose message box
• – Select URL > Input your URL in the space provided.
• – Select attach and then select your image with the arrows.
• – Select Attach Link Preview.

Option 2

• – Select Your Pinterest Board from your compose message box.
• – Click Photo or File and browse for an image on your computer.
• – Click on the Link icon to attach a link to the image. Click Attach Link Preview.

Option 3

• – To post a video, either with YouTube or Vimeo – Click ‘URL’ and then insert the share URL for the video > Click Attach link Preview.

Note: if you have YouTube added as a service already on your account you can access your channel videos by clicking on ‘attach video’.

Viewing analytics and creating reports:

Head over to:

My Reports > Report builder > Add Modules > Channels > Pinterest > Setup

There you can add modules relating to:

• – The number of boards in this Pinterest account.
• – The number of people following this Pinterest account.
• – The number of people being followed by this Pinterest account.
• – The number of likes made by this Pinterest account.
• – The number of pins made by this Pinterest account.

Overview of the integration with Send Social Media:

♦ Management of multiple Google+ Pages alongside your other social media properties.
♦ Publishing on your Google+ Pages
♦ Post status updates, rich links, and photos to your Google+ page(s)
♦ Monitoring and responding to your Google+ Page connections
♦ Review posts made by the connected Google+ pages and the people and pages they follow
♦ Comment on posts as the Google+ page
♦ Delete your own posts/comments and any comments on your posts made by others
♦ Retrieve analytics and reports

Send Social Media’s been extremely busy in the past month with YouTube, Instagram and now Google+ integrations.

In the meantime here’s a basic run-through of just some of the capabilities with Send Social Media’s Google+ integration:

Add the Google+ Service to your Send Social Media Account

Go to Add/Edit Services and select Google+ Pages from the extensive list of Social Media integrations

Publish & Schedule Updates To Your Google+ Pages

Google+ is now fully integrated into your compose message box; Simply select the Google+ tab, Type your message, schedule if needed and hit send.

Manage Google+ Activities, Comments & Streams

Manage the influx of incoming Google+ activities alongside your other social media properties. Click on the users names to see a snapshot of their Google+ profile. You can respond directly and click the drop down arrow to assign to a team member or translate back to your native language if needed.

Advanced Google+ Analytics

In the My Reports section of your dashboard, Send Social Media now provides you with 5 distinct modules to help you measure your success with your Google+ pages.
– People who add your page to their circles (growth)
– Posts on your page
– Aggregated comments on your page
– Aggregated +1′s on your page
– Aggregated reshares on your page
– Best time to post to Google+