Small businesses are all about executing effective bootstrap marketing programs. Budgets, time, and personnel are tight. Small business marketing is value-centric, with a more bang for your buck mentality. That’s why small businesses love social media. It’s cheap, powerful, and can scale with any business. Small businesses can’t afford marketing automation software that can cost hundreds of dollars per months. That’s why it’s important to identify cheap (read: free) tools that can get the job done in a jiffy. For example:

HootSuite

HootSuite is the de facto social media management platform. You can aggregate many of your networks, schedule posts, monitor custom newsfeeds and much more. Also, you can upgrade to their very affordable Pro version to gain access to reports and other analytics. This is the solution for you if you need to manage multiple accounts on different networks.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is basically HootSuite lite. It can still aggregate news from different networks, but is best suited for a company that wants to manage a couple of accounts. It’s UI is extremely streamlined and simple to use. TweetDeck offers many of the same features as the free version of HootSuite, just in a downloadable desktop client. It is also owned by Twitter now, so support is great.

TweetReach

Twitter has a variety of metrics that are worth keeping track of to measure your ROI. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, Twitter doesn’t publish impressions. These have to be manually calculated and estimated, or a third party solution needs to be used. TweetReach is a great free-mium tool that analyzes any Twitter account and calculates its total impressions. It also highlights which posts performed well, your exposure, and top contributors. TweetReach is great for giving you a snapshot summary of your online performance. Keep in mind that it only looks at your past 50 tweets, if you want data beyond that then you will need to upgrade to the paid version.