Staying Mobile Keeps Your Small Business Active During the Holidays

Go Mobile to Maintain Small Business Buzz Through the Holidays

Dec 24, 2009 -

It's that time of year when work becomes secondary and the holidays take priority. Travel, unpredictable weather, family outings, and last minute shopping runs replace the routine 9 to 5. 
Unfortunately, even though the majority of the workforce will be taking time off around the holidays, social media never takes a vacation, so neither can your SMB's social media presence.

You can, however, keep the tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, and work notes coming without a computer using these handy mobile applications. 

 
 

Stay All-a-Twitter

It's especially important for small businesses to maintain an active Twitter presence with no extensive or perceivable gaps. At any time someone could have an important question or encounter a big bug and turn to Twitter with their query or complaint. 

To keep both an active and passive glance on your Twitter account while you're mobile-only, try HootSuite or Tweetie 2 for iPhone.
The latter is a $2.99 fan favorite on the iPhone and includes everything you'll need to keep an eye on your replies, view your Twitter Lists, explore trending topics, and search for mentions of your company name. 

HootSuite, a newly launched $1.99 iPhone app is tailored towards the business user and boasts convenient features like scheduling tweets in advance, and stats around the links you share on Twitter.

If you're on a BlackBerry, keep Seesmic's BlackBerry app handy for access to your account, Twitter Lists, saved searches. You'll even benefit from alerts for DMs and replies while the application is running in the background.

Android users can use a version of the Seesmic app on their phones too, but most users have an affinity for  Twidroid, a feature and style-rich application that comes in both free and paid versions. Features like Twitter Lists support, bit.ly integration, desktop widgets, background notifications, and the ability to merge multiple accounts will make your Twitter for business behaviors less work, more play.

Keep Facebook Fans Engaged

Almost anything you can do on Facebook's web site, you can also do on your mobile device. You can go the SMS-only route and update your Page or Profile status via text message, and/or receive SMS updates for messages and wall posts as they happen. 

 
 

You can also grab one of the company's many mobile apps - they've got one for iPhone, Palm OS, Sony Ericsson, INQ, BlackBerry, Nokia, Android, Windows Mobile, and Sidekick - or use their mobile site to keep an eye on Page activity. 

Blog From the Road

While your business blog can probably afford a few days off, there's no reason why it has to stay stagnant. WordPress has a fantastic and robust  iPhone app for moderating, maintaining, and updating your WordPress.com or self-hosted blog. There's even a beta BlackBerry version of the WordPress application, should that be your primary device.

 
 

TypePad has an iPhone app, as well as mobile applications for Palm, Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 devices. With Google's platform, Blogger, you can email your blog content to automatically post to your site from any device after you associate your mobile phone with your blog.

 
 

If you've become accustomed to quick blogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous, all you really need is an email account to update either of them in seconds with text, photos, and videos. Of course, they both also have iPhone applications that make the blog posting process even easier.

Extra Goodies

If you're sitting around the fireplace but you can't get your mind off work,  Evernote makes the perfect app -- available for most mobile devices -- to quickly capture your passing thoughts as a text, audio, or photo note. Since your notes sync to the web and the desktop software, you can access, edit, and share them when you get to the office on Monday morning.

 
 

And if you really can't put work off, grab Documents to Go for iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, or Palm OS for accessing, updating, and creating Microsoft Office documents on your mobile device. Google Documents are a good alternative as well.