There are a number of free tools available to help you manage your social media marketing. This is great news for small business website owners on a tight or zero advertising budget. Some of the more popular ones are TweetDeck, Socialoomph and hootsuite. They help users listen to what is being said on a particular topic, about your brand and allow you to schedule what time and date you want to send out posts. My favorite one of these three is hootsuite. It has more features and can also help manage your activity on facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.

I will give you some ideas as what to include in your posts later. What I want to share with you now is how I use hootsuite and twitter to find more potential customers for my fly fishing online shop. Once you have logged in to hootsuite with your twitter account you want to set up newsfeed columns on different topics as shown in the image below. All you do is click the "add stream" button in the top left corner and enter a search term. To set up my first "listening" column I entered the word "trout". Hootsuite then set up a newsfeed column on the desktop containing tweets that contained the word trout. I can now find people on twitter who are talking about trout. These are the sort of people who potentially would be interested in the products I sell.    

I then clicked the "add stream" button again and entered a new search term "fishing flies". Another column appeared on the desktop containing tweets with those words in the text. I carried on and made three more columns; one for "salmon fishing", one for "salmon flies" and another for "permit fishing". A permit is a Caribbean fish that eats crabs and I sell crab imitation flies. Everyday I spend five minutes in the morning going through these newsfeed columns to read what people are talking about. You can learn a lot that can help your business and blog.

If people on twitter are asking advice on a subject, you now have the theme of your next blog. If they are talking about how one type of product is better than another, you now know which one is more in demand and will be in a better position to supply that need. You can also post messages and questions using hootsuite. Twitter is great for market research. You can ask consumers which is the preferred color, size and features most looked for on a product. You can run surveys; do people prefer a green or a red one?