Small businesses may not have the social clout of larger companies but all is not lost, writes Andrew Hennigan

Major brands can afford a generous budget for social media activities, a budget that covers top-tier digital PR agencies, high-end tools like Cision, Radian6 or Sprinklr and a cast of full-time employees.

Smaller fry, however, have to make do with free or inexpensive tools and staff who perhaps have other tasks too. But this limitation should never stop a small or medium business from maintaining a social media presence. Thanks to some free or almost-free tools and a few professional tricks, any business can maintain an impressive social presence with surprisingly lean resources.

Here are some tips:

1. Use tools to help you maintain a consistent presence on social media

Ideally your business should be present on social media more or less all the time, but this does not mean that someone has to be paid to sit and watch Twitter and Facebook all day. The secret is to use free or inexpensive scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Buffer or Sproutsocial.

2. Plan a strategy in advance

Everything that can be planned in advance – news, promotions and reminders – should be scheduled to appear at certain times throughout the day or week. Doing all the scheduling work in one sitting means that the person doing it will be able to use their time more efficiently.

Once the posts have been scheduled the person responsible for your company’s social accounts just has to watch for any replies, comments or mentions so that they can respond quickly.

Usually this means just watching a single screen, since tools like Hootsuite allow you to view different accounts at the same time in parallel columns. When you are not expecting so many responses from customers you don’t even need to watch that screen because it is also possible to set up alerts to let you know when something has happened.

3. Use email alerts and monitoring tools and respond to posts from others

Social media sites like Twitter always include options for email alerts, but there are also free tools like IFTTT that allow you to setup so-called ‘recipes’ that trigger an action in one channel when something happens in another. Monitoring shouldn’t be limited just to your own accounts because it can also be very effective to respond to posts from other people about your products, brands, company, business or even competitors.

A few years ago a man called Thomas Cook posted a message on the Thomas Cook Facebook page asking for a free holiday to compensate for all the inconvenience of having the same name. Rival lowcostholidays.com stepped in and offered him a free trip to Paris, earning both a viral social media story and coverage in the newspapers like the Daily Mail.

4. Be mobile

Pictures of social media ‘war rooms’ of big name brands always show people watching a wall-sized display but this is mostly for show. In reality, most monitoring happens on people’s laptops.  Hootsuite also has a mobile app so that the community manager doesn’t need to be tied to their desk – you can read and respond to social posts on the go using just a smartphone. Paid plans also allow different people to schedule tweets through the same account, which is very useful if you plan to have a freelancer writing the posts.

5. Don’t forget your social metrics

Even when the budget is limited, management will still be asking for metrics to measure the impact of social media efforts. High-end tools used by major brands include the automatic generation of reports analysing social media activity, but there are also free or inexpensive tools that can already provide surprisingly detailed information and sometimes even auto-generated reports.

6. Apply analytics to understand your impact

Social sites like Twitter include their own free analytics tool, which can give detailed stats about the impact of tweets. Other sites like Klout estimate social media influence and are a useful way to compare yourself against competitors. Hootsuite includes its own measurement and reporting options, though the cost starts to increase rapidly when you use the report generation feature. There are also many other professional tools like Klear and Quintly that analyze social media activity and offer useful features either free or inexpensively.

Used together these tools paint a detailed picture of the impact of your social media efforts and – perhaps more important – show how you are doing compared to competitors.