10 of the Best Social Media Tools for Entrepreneurs

Description

This series is supported by Grasshopper, the Virtual Phone System designed for entrepreneurs. Learn more about Grasshopper at Grasshopper.com .

Whether your company is just starting out, just starting to turn a profit or already on the verge of an acquisition, as an entrepreneur you’ll be constantly evaluating the tools that will help get your business to the next stage.

Even if the ink on the business plan isn’t dry yet, you want to be armed with the social media tools that will play an important role in company communication, product and brand promotions, and business development for your startup. Some of the tools in this list will be familiar, but it’s worth taking a moment to reframe how they might become power tools in a business context.

10. Monitter

As an entrepreneur, you need to know what people are saying about your company as well as your competitors. Enter Monitter , 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.

Pro Tip: By default, the Monitter interface is gray on black, which can be hard on the eyes. You can switch to a more typical color scheme by selecting the “light” theme in the menu at the upper right.

9. YouTube

You already know about YouTube , but have you thought about how it could help your business? Could your product benefit from an awesome video walkthrough? Could your marketing strategy include a viral video strategy that gets you lots of exposure at relatively low cost?

And now with Promoted Videos getting placement in AdSense units around the web, there’s ...

Original URL

http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/socia-media-entrepreneurs/

http://mashable.com/2009/10/26/socia-media-entrepreneurs/