Small businesses are still trying to understand and properly use social media to expand their brand and market their products and services. To that end, management of social media accounts can seem like an overwhelming task with the number of social channels continually rising. Postling is a social media management tool for small businesses with an emphasis on simplicity for brand marketing.

It’s no secret that social media is currently the most pronounced way of garnering attention for your brand or business. Facebook alone is like its own ecosystem with likes, shares, apps, surveys and other features. Individuals don’t have to worry about their Facebook presence or Twitter re-tweets, but businesses do. A lot of time and money go into building brand pages on social media channels, which means businesses need results to justify the commitment of resources.

Results come from regular participation, sharing and promotion. To manage all social media outlets equally is an enormous task for small businesses. Personnel doesn’t exist for such promotion while marketing and advertising for small businesses is still an area that is addressed in house and outsourced on a per case basis.

Postling’s social media management interface allows small businesses to share and promote through their social channels from a single platform. Postling can manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, WordPress, Tumblr, Yelp, Bit.ly, CitySearch, Blogger, Squarespace, Typepad, Drupal and Flickr. The wide range of choices allow small businesses a chance to focus their efforts instead of dividing their time between social media outlets.

Features

The brilliance is in cross posting to eliminate the need for multiple posting across multiple sites. Through Postling, users can publishing their content in one centralized location to all their social media sources. Posts can be scheduled to further save time and manage targeted messages. Comments can also be monitored through Postling to help businesses and brands react quickly.

Tracking social conversations is part of the Postling package with enhanced threads to breakdown comments and follow their flow at any time. Additionally, Postling provides a recap of daily activity across social accounts, which provides information that would otherwise require navigation to each individual website.

Since Postling is focusing on small businesses and brands, additional account users can be added to help with posting and overall management. There are a number of other features Postling offers to improve a small business’ dedication to social media as well as their performance.

Final Notes

Postling is a well rounded all in one solution for social media management. The tracking features for comments, reviews and interactions is of particular interest and helps to justify this non-free solution. Postling is $5/month (for first 5 accounts, +$3/month for additional accounts). There is a trial period of $1 for the first 30 days to allow for testing of the service at a minimal charge.

The Postling interface offers a variety of social media outlets for publishing content and the iPhone mobile app makes it convenient for on the go management. Overall, Postling is a decent service that is definitely targeted towards small businesses that are limited on time and need to manage all social content from one location.

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Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection

With so many social networks available and more popping up all the time, it’s no wonder social management services have been successful. One of the newer kids on the block is GrabInbox, a little startup that’s part of Chile’s startup incubator program.

What does GrabInbox offer?

Social management services have been popping up every so often over the course of the past 2 years or so. While Hootsuite rules the roost, other players are starting to make some headway into the market and develop their own method of helping users interact and stay connected with their followers.

GrabInbox provides users with an interface to manage multiple accounts across multiple social networks. Currently GrabInbox can manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, Facebook fan page and LinkedIn accounts. The service also offers scheduling of Tweets and Facebook posts which is a must from any social management tool.

Posts can be scheduled to a single account or across multiple accounts. GrabInbox monitors your social network’s interactions and updates with mentions, comments, etc. giving users a dedicated platform to work with. Included in the interface is the option create custom tabs for following specific interests as opposed to a main stream.

GrabInbox offers a bookmarklet or plugin for Google Chrome users.

Benefits and Drawbacks

The biggest benefit to GrabInbox is that it is free, at least for now. While in beta, the service is free though Nischal Shetty, founder of JustUnfollow.com and developer on GrabInbox admits that will likely change sometime in the future.

Though beta is a benefit from a pricing standpoint, it’s also a drawback if you’re looking for a glitch-less alternative to Hootsuite. GrabInbox is fully functional, but due to it’s beta tag users should expect some hiccups during usage.

Final Thoughts

We certainly think more competition for social management tools is a good thing and are impressed with GrabInbox’s progress so far. We’d like to see them separate themselves from the competition with a unique feature that entices us to use it over more popular services.

GrabInbox as a social management tool is sufficient and will be a quality option once all the bugs are worked out. Some more features and managed accounts (Google Plus once the API is available) would be a welcome addition to propel them to popularity.

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Make Your Website Part Of The Nifty Collection