What social media management tool should I use? I would like one that has a nice dashboard allowing me to CRUD everything.

Take a look at how other companies with similar problem resolved it, for example: AirBnB, Uber, TaskRabbit and others. Every one of them, unless they were extremely lucky with timing, used a narrow geographic focus, approaching established communities and fulfilling demand for one side by hand for the first little while. In your case you can approach established organisations like universities, churches, foundations, volunteer organisations and the like to get people that would do things and do exactly the same for the other side. Initially you need to do it by hand until it starts going viral. Spreading the word through social media is great but it needs to be very targeted and approach people that can already find something in the application. If there are other organizations that do similar postings, for example if there are requests for volunteering on Craigslist, you can approach them to have it posted in your application. Narrowing on one geographic location is always easier in the beginning, because you can learn the area and all the players involved in the scene, and then maximise the output, expanding to new geographic locations when needed. It doesn't mean limiting your app, but just focusing your marketing efforts in one narrow location that can bring biggest output. Everything that I mentioned above can be applied to offline and online social marketing. Unfortunately there is no magic solution to your problem except for bootstrapping it in the beginning and finding communities that you can leverage with biggest social impact return. Good luck! Denis.

I work extensively in the healthcare market. In particular I have quite a bit of experience marketing to MDs and other healthcare providers. And in my experience - that audience is not likely to be reached via social media. Medical professionals (particularly MDs) are mainly offline. Online business related activity is generally limited to reading journals and correspondence with other medical professionals. In fact - they have such a huge "target" painted on their back that they are very challenging to market TO at all. This is not to say that you can't be successful in working with them. Only that if you "target" them you're likely to get stonewalled. I'm curious why you are intent on reaching them in this manner (i.e. social media)? One of the main tenets I teach my coaching students is to find out where your market is... Not to choose a form of media (i.e. twitter, FB, etc) and hope to reach them there. You may have greater success (and waste less time/money) re-thinking your business model. I can certainly help with this if you decide to go in that direction. In any case - Best of luck!

Hi! Happy to answer this question. Initially, I'd ask "what are you tracking at present?" And "what are your goals?" Software wise, I love to use a few tools for Twitter. Hootsuite to schedule relevant content (and not all tweets should be scheduled--happy to touch on this more), Tweetreach to get a feel for impressions/influencers who HAVE been engaging (in my mind, impressions are KEY, more so than Follower count because hashtags can help you reach more people) and Sprout Social for a more in depth view of your Twitter analytics. Getting more visibility/followers: what hashtags are you using? How often do you acknowledge those who follow you (new followers vs existing followers)? Are you just sharing autoscheduled content and links OR are you creating conversations? Hashtags wise: find those that have a community already centered around them! *You don't want to "hashtag hijack" however, tags like #smallbiz #blogchat #_________ specific to your industry or ideal client's industry can go a long way. Other tools that people use to track community and engagement include Sum All, and Commun It https://commun.it/ Once you start tracking impressions (and monitoring growth vs plateaus) you can then go back and look at your content to see which posts generated the most response/engagement. Again, just want to emphasize that creating conversations and asking questions are great methods to do all of the things you are looking to accomplish.

I think you can be charging much more than you are, but if you're working with smaller businesses then maybe that budget is more reasonable. Why not offer some kind of tiered option? A post is $15, highlights are $10, but if you get both they're $20—something like that. If you other avenues to distribute your news (like a newsletter, for example), you can add additional packages. I also think 3:1 is too many ads but if your audience is still engaging and there isn't a noticeable dropoff, that's not too bad.

It's far less important than it used to be, because so many social media businesses are much more reliant on their apps than their desktop websites these days. Instagram launched (and grew fast) with the domain instagr.am, for instance.