Mobile Apps for Promoting Your Small Town Business
- twttLee Cloer
- Dec 17, 2015
- 4 min read
As a small business owner you may have most of your needs taken care of. You have a process for hiring talent. You have goals for getting the word out about your small business. You have accounting software, equipment to provide your services, and manufacturers to create your products. You have a powerful computer and an equally powerful smart phone.
The smart phone is one of those very important tools that have potential to help your business succeed. But often, just like a small business website, business owners are unaware of how to put the smart phone to work, unlocking its full potential.
I use my smart phone all the time. To me it is more than just a way to contact people – more than just to post pictures of my family to Facebook. I see my phone as a powerful tool, a pocket computer that I use to promote what I do for the company where I work as well as to promote and grow my own business startups.
There are many smart phone apps that can be used to grow a business. I am going to share 10 I have used that I think you may need to consider.
10 Mobile Apps for Promoting Your Small Town Business
GAnalytics (e6bapps) – Google Analytics gives the website owner valuable information about the traffic on their website. It’s free to sign up and is an invaluable asset to support the most important tool a small business owner can have, their website. GAnalytics is a free app that lets you see your websites traffic information from Google Analytics directly on your phone.
DropBox (DropBox, Inc.) – Drop Box is a free file hosting service. When you first sign u
p you get 2 GB of free storage space. Then you can access your free storage space through a web interface, connect it directly to a computer, or even download their free app to get to it from your smartphone. What this means to me - I don’t have to carry a thumb drive around with me anymore.
I connect my DropBox to my home computer, my work computer and others I have to work on like church. I can access the files from any of these locations.
Square (Square, Inc.) – With the Square app on your phone along with the Square Secure Card Reader that attaches to your phone, you can accept payments by debit and credit card on your smart phone or iPad quickly.
Evernote (Evernote Corporation) – I use the Evernote app on my phone to collect and organize information of my contacts. When I meet people I put add their name and some details about them
or the event so I can refer to them later on. I also can keep a record of ideas that hit me when I’m on the road, help me remember things I like, save to do lists, and more. The information saves in my account, and I can access it from a website. A great way to keep your contacts organized and help you remember the important things to you.
Facebook Pages Manager (Facebook) – My Facebook app lets me interact with my personal Facebook page. But the Facebook Pages Manager allows me to monitor and manage my many different Business and Organization Facebook pages. If you are responsible for a Facebook Page you need the Pages Manager app on your phone.
Twitter (Twitter, Inc.) – If you have a business, you should have a Twitter account. You can read why you need a Twitter account for a business here. The Twitter app on your phone lets you manage and post tweets to your Twitter page. If you manage multiple ones you can easily switch
between accounts to post to the one you need. Very important when it comes to updates I put out for various organization Twitter accounts we use to send alert text messages to followers.
Pinterest (Pinterest, Inc.) – If you manage a Pinterest account for your own personal use or for a business the Pinterest app is essential to interact with your account. You can take your
photos from your phones camera, or even put graphics from your DropBox account and upload directly to your Pinterest account via your smart phone.
Google+ (Google Inc) – Google+ app will allow you to interact with your Google+ page like Facebook. Google+ is important because you can reach people you may not normally come in contact with through your Facebook page.
HootSuite (Hootsuite) – If you feel overwhelmed by all the social media interaction that I recommended above, using one interface to manage them all might be the solution for you. Hootsuite is a great way for you
to manage up to 5 social media accounts, even to schedule posts to go out automatically, all in one location… for FREE. If you manage more than one social media account… you have to check out Hootsuite.
WordPress App (Automattic, Inc) – I use this very, very important app to manage some of my
websites. I can choose which website that I need to edit, or post a new blog entry with a photo directly from my phone.
This interaction makes it immediately available on that website and available to those visiting the website. For you to use this app for managing your website it would need to be a WordPress website. WordPress is a powerful, easy to manage blogger friendly publishing platform for your personal, business, and/or organizational website.
I hope this article will lead you to share with us the smart phone apps you use and why they’re important to your business. We'd love to hear your input.
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