The Confident Copywriter

Last week, we talked about finding time in your day to begin marketing yourself online using social media. Many of you commented, and rightly so, “it ain’t easy.”

So I thought I’d point out a few useful, free social media marketing tools to help you be more productive and efficient as you access the power of the Internet.

Free Twitter Tools

Your Twitter account is ready to go. You’re mentally ready to deal with a flood of customers…after all, stats show your Twitter followers are about 80% more likely to buy from you. So the question is: how can you keep up with your tweets and retweets?

How about Twitter.search? Just like a Google search, Twitter.search will let you search for hot topics in real time. Search by keyword, search your name or company name…filter any type of search at all, and ‘spy’ on what’s hot and what’s not.

Want to filter your Twitter searches in real time and geographically? Try Monitter to target a specific geographic radius, using sets of three keywords.

Want to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are saying about your company…or any company or topic? Then you want Trakur, a comprehensive social media monitoring tool that monitors any topic, sends alerts via RSS or email, allows custom filtering of results, tracks sentiments and trends, automates monitoring of your online reputation, gathers insights into customer behavior, tracks the effectiveness of your marketing campaign…

WHEW! Trakur is truly the Mac Daddy of free social monitoring tools.

Remember the Milk is a time management tool that helps you stay organized…not so easy when you’re managing a busy business and playing a daily round of social media marketing.

Remember the Milk helps you manage daily tasks, create reminders, share those reminders with your team and access reminders from your smart phone. You can integrate your schedule with Google Calendar, add tasks from iGoogle, plot your to-do list on a map, organize lists and notes, and then easily search anything you’ve stored to quickly refresh your memory. Awesome.

And lest we forget that what happens after you capture the lead is also important, there’s MailChimp, a nifty web-based mailing list manager that offers tracking and analyzing of email campaigns along with customized HTML templates. If you send less than 3,000 emails each month to 500 or less subscribers, MailChimp is free. But that’s not even the best part!

MailChimp can be upgraded and integrated with Twitter, Wordpress and other sites. Free training is available too. MailChimp allows you to share your email campaign across multiple networking channels via auto tweets and includes retweet analysis to determine effectiveness of your campaign. Even your clients can share your email campaign across their own social networks. How’s that for cool features?

What other social media marketing tools do you use and like?

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