How to Stay Updated with Business News if You are a Small Business Owner?

As a small business owner, to claim any respectable competence in this fast-paced world, it seems you need to keep up with every business news the world is throwing at you.

The optic cables are crisscrossing our cities. The planet is ringed with satellites. And the news networks are maniacally informing you about the rising stock prices.

Add all that to your new habit of checking your—no-longer tiny—devices every 9 minutes (often lesser), and you can begin to make out why the world of business news might feel very gloomy.

You need information, of course. However, the question of how to stay updated with the best business news sources is as important as what sources you are obtaining your news from.

If you don’t give that ‘how’ question its due, it might result in you seeing a lot more, and strangely, end up knowing a lot less about things that matter.

How to Stay Updated with the Best Business News Available?

The bombardment of the notification may make it seem like the business world is in crisis. You may feel it’s a terrible day, a week, or a year, and that civilisation might never come out of this last blow.

Nevertheless, history reminds us to take information from a broader perspective.

The famous metaphor compares the business world, at all times, to a ship in a storm. The important detail here is that the ship is not sinking. The frightening circumstances may seem obvious, but the broader perception suggests that times have always been a little frightening, and the markets have survived far worse than what it is currently dealing with.

With that optimistic view of the world of business news, let’s find out how to get our hands on the high-quality business news sources that float on the internet.

How to stay updated in the business world is another way of asking how to get to the stuff that matters. It’s a proverbial task of how to separate the wheat from the chaff. And we need tools to do that.

For this article, we are picking the 5 most efficient tools for small business owners, to stay updated with the business news sources.

Here are 5 tools that can help you sort the valuable news from everything else.

1. A News Aggregator Application

Anyone with any sense of imagination would know that consuming news without personal filters is a straight dive into a black hole. Things usually don’t come back out of those portals. Not soon enough, at least.

A robust feed reader is a smart choice. Nobody wants to trawl the search engines every time they want to check the insightful content from the best business news websites.

A good aggregator lets you keep up with the topics and trends relevant to your business, without being overwhelmed. Both your lives and business research can stay efficient and enjoyable with this little organisation tool.

We cannot move ahead without mentioning Feedly. The current champion among the news aggregators. It lets you follow an insane number of topics. It lets you take notes and highlight information, which you can later save on Evernote, Pocket, or OneNote. And nothing like having a direct button to share on LinkedIn. Or if you use Buffer or any other platforms, Feedly has more available integrations.

To make the experience more efficient, the news aggregator applications often have paid services and offer features such as Follow Newsletter or Twitter Feeds straight from the interface. That’s neat.

2. Forums

Try to discover industry-specific forums. Q & A websites like Quora are a good example, which receives ample engagement from industry leaders and potential customers. It would be smart to explore any platform with such traits.

Subreddits are another good example. What are subreddits—you may ask?

Subreddits are niche forums made up of millions of people. In other words, a community-determined aggregator of the internet’s best content is neatly divided into threads and categories. You can also use its search feature to find relevant subreddits.

The important part of Reddit adventure is to find out the right set of subreddits, a set more relevant to your business, instead of being a popular set. The efficiency of this platform comes straight out of that distinction.

There are numerous curated lists of subreddits for all business categories on the internet. Find the set that seems most relatable to your business and build upon it.

The top performers from all niches consistently visit subreddits and organise interactive interviews with people interested. AMA (Ask Me Anything) is currently the most popular subreddit that hosts these sessions.

More niche-specific AMA subreddits are also available.

3. Google Trends

It is a  platform where you can explore what humanity is searching for.

Google Trends is a fantastic tool to see what the world is doing, where it is heading and what’s engaging most of us connected to the internet grid.

You can analyse these trends across various regions and languages, so you don’t mix your local trends with what’s going on in an American county.

Now the best part. You can search your business on it. Hold on—even your competitors or even the category of your business. And see how the metrics are performing.

This tool could be a great help in building your perception of the world and knowing the collective perception of the world of your business. If you know how to use data to understand a story and then tell that story to the world, there could be nothing more powerful than Google Trends.

You can very well use a news aggregator to get your set of Google trends. For the most part, it’s not important how you get it as long as you get it.

4. Podcasts

The world is streaming. Once described as the repurposed radio, podcasts today are one of the most efficient ways to receive relevant business news from trusted sources.

The format of podcasts makes it possible to dive deep into topics and make the information more conversational.

It’s an elementary task to find and subscribe to business podcasts on sites like Spotify and Google Podcasts. There are categories, filters, top-performing lists based on the number of listeners and subscribers, etc.

The chances that subject experts who you follow already have an existing podcast are highly probable these days. And if that’s not the case, they sure were invited to a bunch of shows.

If you already have a list of podcasts that you are subscribed to, it’s a good time to think if your business could start its podcast and use it to build its audience.

5. Books and Periodicals

Despite the information revolution, the most distilled information is still hidden within the covers of a book or a magazine written by an expert in his field.

You should explore the variety available based on industries you are interested in. There are thousands of books available on any topic.

Books about the technology, policies and national movements that could have an impact on your business are a great way to filter your reading list.

What’s applicable to your interests should decide what books and periodicals you should or should not pick.

Conclusion

You may always fear that there might be certain information crucial to you that you might have missed.

You, if you know how to organise information, are the driving force of what you consume.

The reason that fuels that force could simply be that the news that might be the least important and urgent to the world could be the key to you and your business.

The inflow of information, especially when it’s thrusting in with such a modern force, should be appropriated with your filters.

Constructing an organised structure around ourselves to filter what gets to us seems to be the most corrective approach to fix our jumpy minds and focus on what’s relevant to us. And that could be the most proficient way to stay updated with the business news.

Also read:

1) Best Tips for Customer Retention for a Small Business
2) Tips to Understand Your Market while Starting a Small Business
3) Tips for Businesses to Overcome the Covid Blues - Revival Tips for Businesses
4) What are the keys to success when operating a small scale business?
5) OkCredit: All you need to know about OkCredit & how it works.

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FAQs

Q. What’s the best way to stay updated with individual companies?

Ans. Twitter accounts of businesses and CEOs ought to be the most efficient way to keep track of the immediate information related to brands.

Q. What are some of the useful apps I can use to stay updated with business news?

Ans. Having a news aggregator app of your choice is a no brainer. Apart from that Reddit, Twitter, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Kindle app, Google Play Books are all useful.