Ever scrolled through feeds on Twitter and Facebook and wondered how on earth your competitors have the time to share so many messages throughout the week? Let me introduce you to Hootsuite - a life-changing social media management system. This fantastic tool gives you complete control over the numerous social media accounts attached to your business, by allowing you to create posts in advance and schedule them to appear whenever you want. It's also simple to set up and free to use! Here are my top tips to get you started as well as just a few of the advantages and useful features which Hootsuite has to offer:
Top Tips on Setting Up
Hootsuite might look a bit intimidating at first glance, however, the set up process isn't actually too difficult and the site becomes easier to navigate the more you use it.
Start by adding the social media accounts in which you connect most with your desired audience. These will be the accounts you want to be most active on. The free version allows you to add up to three accounts and you can choose from Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress, Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Mixi, as well as a host of others via the apps.
You then want to keep your social media accounts organised. Using the Streams section you can easily keep track of each social media account's scheduled posts, live feeds, direct messages and so on. With all this information and live action at your fingertips you will be able to interact immediately with your desired audience.
Time Saver
Trying to maintain regular activity on social media sites on top of a recruiter's packed schedule can be a challenge. However, one of the greatest advantages of Hootsuite is that it allows you to write and store posts in advance. This means they’re ready to be sent whenever you have scheduled them for, which saves you time in the long run. All you need to do it sit down and fire out all of your messages in one sitting. In less than an hour you could have created a couple of weeks worth of posts ready to go out daily from all social media platforms.
The World at Your Fingertips
Another reason to love Hootsuite is that it allows you to view and manage your social media accounts all at the same time. This means less to-ing and fro-ing between the different websites which allows you to update everything at once and save you time. It also means you are able to respond to the activity on your social media platforms all in the same place.
Useful Features
There are numerous useful features on Hootsuite which can save you even more time and effort when communicating with your audience:
- You can create templates of text which you can use later for posts which you would send out regularly, such as job adverts.
- You can schedule the same message to be posted on multiple sites.
- You can run basic reports on each social media account to assess the progress of the activity on each site.
- Hootsuite also have a great browser add-on, the Hootlet. This allows you to schedule content in one click as you’re browsing, meaning if you come across a great article that you think your followers would love too you can share/schedule it then and there.
