Before we get started, you should know that if you don’t currently use a management service for your business’ social media outreach, you’re probably spending way too much time and energy on it. Doing it yourself without a management platform will work just fine if you don’t have any real campaign for promoting your business on social, but if you do, it’s a pretty basic practice to use a service like Hootsuite.
While there are a few services who do this, Hootsuite pretty much leads the industry in SMM (Social Media Marketing) tools. Take this under advisement if it sounds like something you could use. We’re going to go over the features that you’ll need if you’re serious about promoting on social media.
Social Media Management Can Be Way Easier
When you don’t have a program to manage it, social media takes a great deal longer than it needs to. Just the practical problems, alone, will jam up your day quite a bit. Continually moving between apps, logging in and out, and creating individual posts or the same posts again and again for each social site are all things that are unnecessary with a management program. Adding images and video to each post is also really time-consuming.
The whole idea of Hootsuite is to get it all done more quickly and easily. It’s a brilliant solution for SMM, making it possible to do everything from the same platform, without ever needing to log into each of your social media accounts. If you use social media outlets to promote your business (which you should be), then you need to have this tool.
Consolidating Your Social Media
Social media management has come a long way in the past few years. Obviously, creating and designing the actual content that you’re going to post may take some time if it’s high-quality content, but the task of posting it shouldn’t take a long time. That should be the easy part, and Hootsuite makes it very easy.
To begin with, take each platform—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any others—and just add them all to your Hootsuite account. Once they’ve all been added, there won’t be any need to log into each account, individually. As it can become overwhelming to handle them all, with so many different social channels, it would be crazy not to take advantage of an affordable service that turns multiple channels into one, easy-to-use platform.
The private accounts that belong to you and your employees can also be added for business posts. You don’t have to use every account for every post, either, and that’s part of the beauty of this tool. You decide how you want the social media campaign to be organized and set the parameters in whatever configuration or schedule that you need.
Schedule Posts in Advance
Scheduled posting is probably the most awesome feature included with Hootsuite. You will never have to break away from your day to post something because you can set it beforehand, even way beforehand, to post by itself, automatically.
This feature really comes in handy when you’re a business owner who doesn’t have a staff to handle content, forcing you to do it all yourself, which you most likely don’t have the time to do. You can schedule content to publish itself, in any or all of your social channels, at any time that you choose.
Schedule an unlimited number of posts, add any media to it, and set it up way in advance. You can schedule your posts for the day, for the week, or even for the month; then, you can just forget about them and the Hootsuite platform will automatically post them at the exact dates and times that you’ve set.
Useful Monitoring Features
There are all kinds of features that you’ll have at your disposal to monitor the action. The first thing that you can do is to set up social streams, and they are unlimited. Your streams show all the engagement you’re getting for each channel as they come in. You can add as many streams as you want and organize them in tabs, however it works best for you in a quick-view access dashboard panel.
The next feature you may find useful is the ability to search by keyword or location to track engagement. Use the monitoring filters to see where your engagement is coming from, and find out what users and followers are saying. You can search by keyword, hashtag, or location.
Responding to the people who are engaging with you is also very important. Using the Hootsuite platform, you can respond as a team instead of moderating and replying to every comment by yourself. You can make any of your team members a moderator so that multiple people can respond to users as the responses come in. At the same time, you can also remain the admin if you like, to approve any responses from your team before they go out.
Finally, add apps to your account to monitor even more aspects of your social campaign. Whatever you need to know, you can track all kinds of data to see how your posts are performing, such as reviews, conversations, and site ratings for your company.
Boost Any Post
If you have some great content that you think needs some extra power behind it, it can’t hurt to give it a little juice by boosting posts. Boosting posts isn’t always effective, but Hootsuite does offer a 30-day trial period that you can use to see if it actually may work for you. Even if you’re a firm believer in totally organic content promotion (which is a solid and usually successful approach), it can be a good way to expand the reach of your posts by spreading out to a wider audience that you wouldn’t otherwise focus on, and to target new potential customers.
You can also automate your boosts with the Hootsuite platform according to whatever time parameters you set. Set the filters that tell the program to automatically boost a post if it meets a predetermined set of criteria. For example, you can set budget limits so that it won’t boost a post if that would bump it above a specified cost limit.
If this kind of service sounds interesting to you, you can start a trial account with them by visiting hootsuite.com. They offer 4 plans:
See more information about their plans and pricing at hootsuite.com/plans.
The trial they offer is available for any plan, and they will work with you if a custom pricing plan is necessary, so there’s no risk to take it out for a spin to see if it works well for your company. Honestly, if you are promoting your business in any capacity with social media, then this service will absolutely make your social outreach much easier and more effective. It can’t hurt to try it out for free.
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.