Apps and Sites to help Businesses Manage Social Media Branding

If you are a small business owner active in the social media circuit, there are some free or inexpensive apps you should know about.

Apps are very popular. As of 2009, iPhone users downloaded more than 2 billion apps through iTunes which has more than 85,000 apps for sale. From apps that let you find your car in a crowded parking lot, or alert you when you are getting low on gas, to apps that help you maintain your digital brand from your smartphone.

Here are some Apps to help you should know about:

Twist – A free app which lets you search topics on Twitter that are related to your business. You can get that information in real time and see what people are talking about.

Tweetmic – Allows you to record your tweets and publish an audio file on Twitter stream. Can be used for personal invitations and announcement to tweets you can record quickly while you wait for the traffic light to change.

Qwitter – Lets you know via e mail when someone leaves your Twitter account. It is a paid service that costs $4.99 a month.

YouTube for pages – To stay connected and integrated, this app lets you connect your business channel on YouTube to your Facebook account. You can post your video only once and using this app, connect it to all your other social media sites you are involved with.

Networked Blogs – A promotional tool that lets you link you blog to Facebook. A free app.

Sites:

Mybrainshark.com – A free site that allows the creation, narration and sharing of multimedia presentations.

Icebucket.com – a search engine specializing in blogs. It helps narrow the results when you want to check what blogs are relevant to your business.

KnowEm.com – Allows you to check the availability of your brand name, and see who is using similar names. It can check this information in about 120 social network sites in a matter of a few seconds.

Blinxx.com – another free search engine that allows you to search videos from YouTube, Vimeo etc. Again, this search helps you narrow down the search results to videos only.

Those are but a few examples of how apps and sites can help the business owner save time and get organized. With the proliferation of social media sites it is important to be able to aggregate information relevant to the business. It is equally important to be able to create connections between the official website and social media sites, so they can feed and connect to each other.

Sources:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10362544-17.html

http://smallbusiness.aol.com/2010/12/28/the-best-apps-for-road-warriors/

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/12/13/1970335/6-must-have-brand-boosting-apps.html

http://www.twist.flaptor.com/

http://www.tweetmic.com/

http://www.useqwitter.com/

http://www.involver.com/

http://www.networkedblogs.com/

http://mybrainshark.com/

http://icerocket.com/

http://knowem.com/