Quick Social Media Management on Hootsuite
Does it take a while to login to Facebook, look for your mentions on Twitter and participate in all of your groups on Linkedin?click, wait, click, wait, click, wait…
A very inexpensive way to handle all of these accounts in one place is Hootsuite.
For about $6 a month you’ll be able to do almost everything you need to, inside of one site- can we say TIME SAVER?
To help you out, I wanted to lead you through how I use Hootsuite to handle these 3 accounts- Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.
Of course, you can add other sites to this, including Google+ and a few others, but for now I’ll focus on the Big 3.
Updates Tab For Social Media Management on Hootsuite
Once you are a member of Hootsuite, you can add your Facebook account. I prefer to add both my personal profile and my fanpage. Then I will set up a tab called “Updates” where I’ll have a stream for each.
Generally I keep my profile personal on Facebook, but I’ve found that by using Hootsuite I see more updates in my newsfeed, than going directly to Facebook itself.The fanpage feed will allow me to quickly scroll through and see if I have any comments on my updates.
Linkedin & Twitter
Under the Updates tab I will add my home feed from Linkedin and Twitter.
I find it is much easier visiting here where I can see everything than going to each site separately. Here is a screen shot of what I see now on my Updates tab.
As part of your daily routine, you’ll want to stay on top of your Linkedin feed, just to be up to date on what other professionals are doing in your network.
Twitter Tab in Hootsuite
Twitter gives you a lot of options in Hootsuite, so you’ll use an entire tab for this social media site.Here is what I have:
On the far left is my favorite private list of twitter users- this was set up in Twitter itself but is very useful to stay in touch with important people. I recommend you have a list of your favorites as well. I follow over 20,000 people so there is no way I could function without lists.
Next to that is Mentions– those tweets where my username has been ‘mentioned’ this is great to respond to people and not see all of the other notifications Twitter includes on their site.
In the third stream I have my domain- socialmediafuze.com
*Thanks to Cendrine Mouratt I learned that even with short cut domains (bit.ly, etc) I can still track when my domain is shared on Twitter, so that I may thank the people and build relationships with them.
The last stream and possibly the one I don’t use much – Direct Messages
Because I am actively following new people I get hundreds of direct messages all of the time and I don’t respond to many of them- they are automated spam in my opinion and it drives me bonkers. But, just in case someone awesome (like you) direct messages me, I want to see it.
Linkedin Group Tabs
I can’t say for sure how people are able to stay up to date on their favorite Linkedin groups without using Hootsuite. It would be a treacherous job to open every group each day just to see if anything has changed, or if there are any new discussions.Instead I set up each Li tab to hold 4 groups, then I browse through them once or twice a day – based on how busy they are- to participate.
*Just a note- Hootsuite will allow you to have up to 10 streams in each tab, but you can only see 4 of them at a time, you have to scroll side ways to see the rest. I’ve never been able to completely hone my skills on side ways scrolling, and it gets messy when I’m trying to read something and accidentally touch the mouse. So I’ll stick to my 4 streams per tab, and just make the tabs a short width with short names like Li1, Li2, etc.
Remember you can be a part of up to 50 groups in Linkedin. I am not, I only have my favorite 8 in Hootsuite, but, it is much easier than perusing all of the emails and group pages each day.
Hootsuite Training
There is so much you can do on these networks on Hootsuite. There are dozens of apps that will help you with analytics, followings, searching, finding interesting content to share and more. I’ve used some of these features for clients over the years, but I’ve never had the time to fully explain everything it can do.A
fellow social media professional Mike Alton from The Social Media Hat
recently released his own book on the topic and so far it seems like a real hit. All of my social friends are reading it and talking about it, so I know it is great. Mike has always published amazing content and I’m sure this topic is no different.
The book is low cost at $6.99 (a dollar more than using Hootsuite for a month) so if you’d like to fully use this tool to handle your social media, you must pick it up.Alternative- Hootsuite does offer their own University but I don’t normally recommend it.
While there is a lot you can learn from it, the price is $20+ a month, and it takes a lot more time than reading a book, and you probably do not need the full course.
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Hootsuite Pro affiliate and rabid nut here Mary lol! Awesome job recapping the app. I’ve saved myself 2-3 hours daily using it. Thanks!