Online businesses are realizing the potential of social media as a tool for marketing and increasing sales, promoting specials and generally raising awareness about their company’s services and products.

Social media allows you interact with your customers on a personal level and lets your client base participate in developing your products with real-time feedback, giving businesses valuable marketing intelligence on how their products and services are perceived by the buying public.

Social media also lets your customers show how they are using a particular product and benefiting from it, creating powerful word of mouth viral marketing.

◆ Collective Intellect – collects real time market information, providing insight into consumer opinions for marketing professionals.
◆ Buzz Logic – helps businesses see what social media sites are generating high interest or buzz, so it can advertise there.
◆ Buddy Media Platform – a simple way for both companies and advertising agencies to manage and track their social media efforts.
◆ Alterian Social Media – provides software for public relations and marketing companies to measure, track and monitor businesses rate of success in social media.
◆ Radian 6 – currently the market leader in social media monitoring, they offer a platform to “listen, measure, and engage with customers across the entire social web.
◆ Brands Eye – online reputation monitoring tool.

It’s important for businesses to track the effectiveness of your Social Media campaign to make sure you’re not only meeting the needs of your customers, but to assure you’re allocating labor in an effective way.

It doesn’t matter if you “tweet” 100 times a day if you either aren’t reaching the potential customers you want to inform, or if you are not adequately informing those you do reach.

Social media is a great tool for increasing sales, building brand name recognition and spreading the word on updates, new services and changes in your company’s core products. Using it effectively is the challenge, and these are just some of the tools to help you do that.

SalesWarp Storefront Management offers a wide selection of tools for Managing and Reporting many facets of your business’ Day to Day Operations.

Via Bill H. over at Sell It On the Web.