Social media management tools are a great way to save time and stream line your social media marketing campaigns. If you find the right one it can make your life much easier by allowing you to share updates across all your social media accounts, from one platform. One such social media management tool is called Hootsuite.
What is Hootsuite?
HootSuite is a dashboard that helps organize your social media accounts to increase the success of your online marketing campaigns in a couple of ways. It helps you find targeted audiences and then provides a platform for you to send targeted messages across various social media platforms simultaneously.
Key Features:
The HootSuite dashboard allows you link multiple social media accounts to your one HootSuite account to keep track of multiple “streams” from all your accounts at one time. You can manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress and more, each with customizable streams to keep track of. Some examples of what you can manage include:
- Your Facebook news feed or wall
- Facebook Messages
- Twitter mentions
- Sent tweets or re-tweets
- LinkedIn messages and status updates
- Foursquare updates
- Google + updates and messages
- Youtube
Once you have linked your social media accounts with HootSuite, the dashboard allows you to send messages across any and all of the accounts that are linked, as well as giving the user the ability to schedule times for pre-recorded messages to be sent and to what accounts it should be sent from.
Perhaps the most advantageous feature of HootSuite is the ability to monitor conversations through key word streams. A key word stream gives you the ability to see all of the tweets people have made on Twitter about a given keyword. These tweets will include people that you are not following which gives you access to a entirely new audience to network with. For example I created a stream with the key word “SEO”, instantly I was able to see all the conversations pertaining to SEO and all the questions people were asking about the topic, then I was able to respond to those questions and reach out to people I would never have found otherwise. This is an incredibly effective way of targeting and growing and audience.
Setting Up a Keyword Stream
- Click “Add Stream” at the top of the dashboard
- Click “Keyword”
- Type in a keyword or a keywords phrase into the box, ex: “Search Engine Optimization”
- Hit create, you now should have a stream with specific tweets relative to the keyword(s).
As well as monitoring conversations and managing social media accounts HootSuite offers a built-in URL shortener, which gives statistical breakdowns of link click-throughs for each twitter message. You can breakdown the data by region, popularity and date range. It also allows access to your Facebook insights and Google analytics account to track and record what your social networking is doing for your business.
Don’t miss out on this awesome marketing tool! www.hootsuite.com
For a list of Hootsuite tips check out their Youtube playlist.
By James Maston