Through the years we’ve used many paid and free tools for managing our social media and our team of contractors. Here are some of the most user friendly online business management tools options.

For team management and messaging:

• Slack - alternative to email and phone. (Fee)

• Basecamp - less meetings, more productivity. (Free Trial)

• Trello - project management tool for teams. (Fee)

• Google Sites - (Free) share news with sites on the web or just within your team, get access to free emails.

• Google Docs & Spreadsheets - (Free) chat in chat box live or leave comments when you can’t coordinate a time to meet online.

• Google Hangouts - (Free) integrate with your Google Sites & Docs for Video Chatting.

• Facebook Forums - (Free) This is constantly improving, upload docs, tag posts, chat live, schedule live video sessions - great tool, but beware of hackers when sharing passwords. Apparently, there’s also a Workplace by Facebook (Fee.)

For social media management and automated posting:

• Buffer

• Later

• Tailwind

• HootSuite

Click here to read our thoughts about these social media management tools.

Working as a social media consultant and manager, I work with various Marketers and Small Business owners. If they use a project management tool for their projects, I use it too. They grant me access, assign me a team, and I share weekly and monthly updates, hop in to ask questions, and collect branded content to share on their social media profiles. These tools are very similar, once you’ve learned one, the others are easy to learn. 

With all of the professional business management tools, I still prefer using  Google Docs. However, many brick and mortar companies still use Microsoft. Google has a fix for that, any spreadsheet or doc in Google is easily adapted to Google’s version in a matter of seconds. When you need to send it back, you can save it as a PDF, Rich Text File, or even convert it back to a Microsoft Doc.

Another type of business management tool, is the master data management tool. Master Data Management Tools are basically a single point or place where all data for the organization is stored and accessed by its users. All important data is linked to one master file. Founded in 2007, Profisee is one of the most popular master data management tools. Profisee is, not only, the fastest growing MDM company in the market, but is recognized for its lowest Total Cost of Ownership for enterprise MDM solutions. 

These data management tools can facilitate various platforms and applications. The tool ensures that there are no duplicates and keeps and stores customer data. Wikipedia describes it this way, “Master data management has the objective of providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality-assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information.”

So, what are you waiting for? Get more productive today with one of these business management tools!