Best Social Media Marketing Solutions for Small Businesses 2020

Sparkcentral

Customer service on social media platforms can be a powerful form of marketing by showing the world how much your business values its customers. Sparkcentral gives businesses a social media helpdesk platform, allowing you to quickly respond to potential and current customers' questions and concerns. This real-time engagement both humanizes social media and brings brands closer to leads and followers, helping turn them into loyal customers.

Clarabridge Engage

One of the reasons social media is effective for marketing is that it gives brands and businesses the ability to interact and engage with more people, all with just a few clicks of a mouse. Clarabridge Engage, formerly known as CX Social, is a comprehensive platform that helps you better engage with your customers in real time. It helps you monitor conversations about your brand and products (as well as competitors and your industry in general) across all major social networks, news websites, blogs and forums. The platform also has its own analytics and reporting features, which show you your audience's demographics, your fans and influencers, and more. Additionally, it offers tools to make teamwork simpler among social media managers. Clarabridge offers a free trial. Call the company for a quote.

Livecube

Hashtags aren't always the best solution to maximize social media engagement during live events. Livecube takes the inherent problems with hashtags – misspellings, lack of participation and the clunkiness of revisiting tweets – and uses gamification to incentivize and reward participation. It not only provides a centralized place to find event-related tweets, ideas and connections, but also encourages participation by rewarding users with points, badges and real-life prizes for contributing to discussions. Other features include event management tools that integrate social media, such as speaker scheduling, logistics management, analytics and social networking. Livecube offers pricing information and demos upon request.

Respondology

People don't just tweet about events and random nothings – they also tweet in search of advice, products and services. Find them with Respondology, a Twitter intent-based marketing web app that helps small businesses turn conversations into customers. This self-serve platform lets you comb Twitter for potential customers using highly targeted metrics, such as those in your neighborhood or those seeking your specific type of product or service. For instance, a coffee house can search for tweets containing the terms "caffeine fix" or "need coffee," then flag them to directly reply to the customer. 

LeadSift

LeadSift mines millions of social media conversations, cutting through the noise to deliver relevant, quality leads based on metrics you set, such as geographic information and keywords. For instance, if you own a flower shop in San Francisco, LeadSift's algorithms will find tweets from users located in San Francisco who are looking to buy flowers, as opposed to just tweeting about flowers in general. You can then initiate engagement, target campaigns and create relationships to turn them into profitable customers.

Custard

Custard is a social media management and distribution tool that goes the extra mile by helping you go viral. The Custard team can manage your marketing campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as content-distribution social networks like Pinterest. The company also specializes in SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which not only drive traffic to your business's website, but also apply to social media marketing campaigns to maximize your advertising spend's ROI. Contact Custard for a quote.

HashAtIt

Knowing what's trending is key to reaching the right audience. HashAtIt offers a way to find out what's hot across multiple social networks in real time. Dubbed "the social search engine," HashAtIt collects status updates, tweets and other posts, allowing you to search for the most popular hashtags on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest – all in one place. This free hashtag search platform has a user-friendly interface that includes customizable hashtag boards to filter and organize hashtag searches, as well as the ability to mute irrelevant search results.

WebiMax

If you don't have any social media marketing experience, WebiMax can help. Instead of you navigating the fickle social media marketing waters yourself, WebiMax can create and maintain custom campaigns for you on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram and other social networks. To ensure accurate brand representation, WebiMax strategically crafts and tailors campaigns to a specific business and its consumer base. WebiMax also offers website evaluation to determine the best campaign outlets.

SnapRetail

Social media isn't for everyone, but SnapRetail turns the average small business owner into a social media marketing powerhouse with ready-to-use content. The service offers a library with thousands of prewritten, customizable social media posts to choose from, eliminating the difficulty of crafting attention-grabbing updates. These posts can go on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram. You can use a calendar interface to easily schedule updates. You can also add some pizazz to posts with the SnapRetail app, which enables you to take your own photos to complement your posts. SnapRetail offers annual plans that start at $20 a month.

VerticalResponse

This email and social media marketing platform lets you send email marketing campaigns and schedule posts to your social networks from one dashboard, eliminating the need for multiple separate tools to do your online marketing. VerticalResponse's content-block email editor lets you easily add "follow us" and "share to social" buttons to all your emails and give your readers additional ways to engage. VerticalResponse is free for up to 4,000 emails to up to 300 contacts. Beyond these numbers, you have to select one of the paid plans, which start at $11 a month.

Sociota

Having trouble managing multiple social media accounts? Sociota is a social network management and monitoring platform with the ability to integrate multiple Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn accounts. The platform is easy to use, with features that allow you to post Facebook updates, track Twitter streams, monitor industry conversations and more. Sociota is free for individuals, and paid plans (usually for businesses) begin at $17 per month.

Hootsuite

With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple social networks, schedule messages and tweets, analyze your social media traffic, track conversions, and measure campaign results from one user-friendly dashboard. Hootsuite's social analytics let you create unlimited custom reports, so you can track metrics like top content, likes and shares, follower demographics, and traffic sources. These features help you easily measure reach, increase engagement and maximize your visibility across all types of social channels. Hootsuite supports more than 35 social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. Free Hootsuite accounts offer limited features and are best for individuals. Paid business packages start at $29 per month after a 30-day free trial.

Buffer

With more than 4 million users, Buffer is one of the most popular and well-known social media management tools on the market. This platform offers scheduling for the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram, as well as detailed analytics to show your post activity, influencer engagement, potential reach and more. Buffer makes it easy to create custom social schedules (including the timing and frequency of your posts for each network) and allows you to "re-Buffer" (reshare) any posts that need an extra boost.

Vivial

Vivial is a social and mobile marketing platform designed for local businesses. To drive in-store sales, Vivial integrates things like SEO, mobile websites, advertising and online videos. The service can also boost your social media reach and help you with local print directories. Vivial's dashboard is easy to use, letting you see the progress of your social, email, SEO, mobile and local campaigns in one place.

Additional reporting by Jill Bowers.