Starting a business is a daunting process, and if you’re also trying to navigate the world of social media, you may find that you need some backup. Fortunately, there are great resources like Social Media Today to help you stay on top of the best news and updates, while there's also a range of helpful tools to keep you moving in the right direction.

In this post, we'll look at a few tools that you can use to help grow your business online when you’re first starting out.

1. Instant Username

When you’re setting up new social media accounts, you’re going to want to select a username that’s available across all platforms. Consistency is important for branding, and it’s not ideal to have a different username on Instagram to what you use on Twitter.

Yes, it can be challenging to find an unclaimed username in this day and age, so you'll likely need to get creative. To help, you can try using a service like the newly launched Instant Username, which automatically lets you see what names are available on every social media platform. There are other apps similar to this, but Instant Username is one of the only services in the field that doesn’t show a ridiculous amount of ads and works on mobile devices.

2. Quuu

Finding content to share on social media can be tricky, especially when you're first starting out and you're not as well versed in the landscape as yet.

You’ll also be investing a lot of your time into other aspects of your business process, so you need to get organized to optimize your time.

When it comes to finding content, Quuu makes the process easy. With Quuu, you set up your interests and get daily updates on trending articles in your industry. This makes it easy to find content to share with your audience on social media.

3. Notify

It can also be hard to keep track of your online presence and people mentioning your brand name. Notify can help - the tool synchs with your current messaging system (e.g. Slack) and notifies relevant channels immediately when your name is mentioned online.

You can set Notify to alert you when your brand is mentioned on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, on blogs, and even in Medium posts. Notify saves you time by making sure that you don’t have to search for brand mentions on social media every day.

4. BuzzSumo

Your content marketing strategy should be rock solid when you launch, and determining what topics to write about, to create graphics about, and/or shoot videos in relation to is just as important as the actual creation process.  

Spend some time on BuzzSumo getting to know what types of articles are gaining the most traction on social media channels. This will help you set your content marketing strategy going forward - BuzzSumo will show you what articles get the most social reach, and better enable you to figure out where there are gaps in your industry.

5. Facebook Lead Ads

Most businesses see a busy first week when they launch, but leads and interest trickle back to a normal rate over time. If you want to keep those business inquiries rolling in, try turning on a Facebook Lead campaign.

Facebook Lead Ads qualify potential customers by pre-filling in their information, which they've already provided to access Facebook. This means that when a lead comes in, you can be confident that your potential customer will be on the other end of the phone number or email address that they provide.

Lead Ads can be a great way to kick-start your social media marketing efforts, and drum up some business.

These are just some of the many tools available to help business owners make the most of their digital marketing efforts, which, as noted, can be hugely beneficial in the initial launch phase. Hopefully they help set you on the right track.