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

The most important thing to understand is your audience, or rather your target customer. In the beginning, it can be a bit overwhelming to all of a sudden tackle half a dozen social media platforms and do them all well. Focus on just one or two platforms where you know your ideal customers are. For example, if you're building a saas product for techies, get your butt on Twitter and engage with anyone and everyone who's commenting on related hashtags or other Twitter-ers. Twitterites. If you're producing high-end physical products that look awesome in photos, post daily on Instagram and get people to oogle at your Instagram feed. Of course you should still claim your business name on all the platforms just in case, but focus on a few. Use tools like Hootsuite, MeetEdgar, IFTTT, and Zapier to help you automate some of the posting process. Just don't cheap out on your content ;)

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.

Hello, great question here. First of all you should understand that there is no 1 way and depending on who your audience is and what you sell the answer will definitely vary. A short answer however would be - engagement. Forget about likes and follows and shares are engagement, if you want to be a successful marketer you need to see engagement as conversations. The more conversations you can build around products the more you can rely on them to follow links or follow up on a request when you do make one. With that said, social media updates should be about what your followers want to see - depending on the social media - try to avoid being too pitchy on each post. My name is Humberto Valle, I have been a strategist for about 10 years now and have helped countless of entrepreneurs and businesses thrive through creative competitive strategy and marketing and I'm the co-founder of Unthink.Me. I hope my answer helps you a bit.

Here are some options: ___Free Options___ 1) Make apps without needing to spend a lot of time learning to code. Look into "MIT App Inventor" (http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/). It's a very _easy_ way to make pretty complex apps using drag and drop coding. You can find youtube tutorials that will show you how to make your first app within 5 minutes. I've used MIT App Inventor to make prototype apps for many of my ideas, saving me tens of thousands of dollars if I paid a dev to do it instead. Learn to do "real" coding yourself. The main investment will be your time. There are plenty of free resources for learning coding on the web. I'd suggest learning "React Native", it's a relatively new way to code apps, which allows you to make one app that will run on both Android and iOS. 2) Find a software engineer cofounder. Go to Meetups, conferences, local hackerspaces / makerspaces. Hang out on relevant online forums (e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/ make sure to read their rules for posting before posting though). It won't be easy to find a tech cofounder, your idea will need to be amazing, and you yourself will need to be very passionate and capable in order to convince someone to partner up with you for sweat equity. ___Paid options___ 1) Use developers with less established reputations / portfolios (lower cost, higher risk) Be very wary of freelancers on sites like Upwork, Fiverr, etc. Here are some basic hiring rules: In your hiring script, make sure to ask for all applicants to give their account name for github/bitbucket and Trello. Don't hire agencies, only hire individuals. To get hired, ask them to do a simple task via Trello and submit the code via github/bitbucket. This task should only take them maybe 1 hour. Check the quality of what the applicants and if they deliver it in a timely manner. Keep the 1 or 2 people that do a good job. If you don't do this vetting these "low cost" developers may end up costing a lot in the longer run. 2) Use developers with more established reputations / portfolios (higher cost, lower risk) With this option your app will probably cost > $20k to develop, but it can be worth it if you have a single idea that you know you want to move forward with. I can introduce you to a very high quality developer in NY if you're at this stage. Let me know if you'd like any additional help more tailored to your specific app ideas, best, Lee