Social media marketing is one of the best ways to build your brand and grow your dropship or other dropshipping business and with a few free tools, you can make your efforts even more productive as well as easier!

While there are many services and programs available online that offer social media tools for ecommerce entrepreneurs, many of them require a paid subscription. That’s fine if you want to spend the money and it might be money well spent. But, if you are like many people with a home business, you prefer to save your hard earned cash as much as possible and appreciate freebies whenever and wherever you can find them.

Here are some great free tools to help you master social media marketing:

Blekko—This free service uses slash tags to help you slash in what you do want and slash out what you don’t want. What is a slash tag? Here’s the skinny on it from the Blekko website: “A slashtag is an easy-to-create custom search engine. It is a tool used to filter search results and helps you to search only high quality sites, without spam or content farms.” You can create your own slashtags for groups of URLs, your friends, experts and communities relevant to your niche. This could be a big help finding relevant others on the humongous World Wide Web.

Social Mention—Social Mention is similar to Google alerts except it’s for social media. The Realtime Buzz Widget is one free tool available from this site. It shows the latest realtime buzz about you, your blog, brand, product, or company. Social Media alerts allow you to receive free daily email alerts of your brand, company, CEO, marketing campaign, a developing news story or a competitor.

Friend or Follow—This free tool tells you who isn’t following you back, who you are not following back and who your mutual friends are on Twitter. This is handy for you to keep up with your own followers but also handy to scope out what’s going on with the competition!

Use these FREE tools to make social marketing easier for your ecommerce dropship home business.