Social Media Marketing with Hootsuite
From Tweeting to Hooting :
If you put aside the massive amount of time it takes to design your website with the BlueVoda website builder, create your website’s content and keep it optimized for SEO and updated, that should leave you about 3 minutes a week for social marketing. Let me say first that I think social media marketing is great. It’s being used more and more and it’s obviously producing results for many.
But I can’t help but wonder … how do people find the time to tweet all day, every day? Because there just isn’t time for that. There isn’t much time for facebook either, or managing a LinkedIn account -not to mention the almost impossible task of finding time to keep in touch with and engaging your circles on Google+!
Using a service like Hootsuite to automate your social media marketing is becoming more and more something that must happen. If you’re not familiar with HootSuite, you’re in for a very pleasant surprise. Here at last is a simple, free (sort of), online tool that brings together all your social media accounts, including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn It automates your work and makes basic social media marketing a breeze.
What is Hootsuite?
HootSuite (http://hootsuite.com) is a social media management system for brand management created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The system’s user interface takes the form of a dashboard (just like you find in most Content Management Systems) and supports social network integrations for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, Mixi, MySpace, Ping.fm, and WordPress. Additional integrations are available via HootSuite’s App Directory which includes support for Tumblr, Trendspottr, Constant Contact. Digg, Flickr, Get Satisfaction, InboxQ, and YouTube.
Hootsuite has become massively used for Social Media Marketing. In fact the HootSuite software has won awards from Mashable at their Open Web Awards 2009, the Canadian New Media Award, the Shorty Awards, and “Best Twitter app” from Australia’s mX newspaper.
Ultimately, what Hootsuite does is: automate your social media marketing duties and saves you a great deal of time re-posting links and re-syndicating RSS Feeds.
Getting Started with Hootsuite for Free
Using Hootsuite’s Pro and Enterprise solutions DO cost money, however Hootsuite’s free plan is still a very powerful social tool-kit (even though the feature-set is limited in comparison to the paid versions) and it still provides you one-tool to un-tangle and organize your social life (think of it as the social media marketing equivalent to Sauron’s One Ring). The Basic (free) HootSuite plan allows you to enjoy and grow your social networks. Use the easy and powerful dashboard to quickly construct streams to track the mentions, messages and keywords you care about.
You can use the Basic HootSuite to manage up to 5 social profiles including: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Foursquare, WordPress.com and more – create a custom mix to fit your favorites. Spread messages to your audience with Twitter Reply-All and ReTweets – plus post images to Facebook Pages & Profiles and auto-publish updates from your blog. Keep involved in the conversations with keyword monitoring, real-time search, trending topics, and on-the-fly Twitter list creation. Enjoy social media by signing-up for HootSuite Basic today – It’s free and pretty awesome.:
- Manage 5 social profiles
- Auto-update from your blog
- Track brand mentions
- Create Twitter lists on the fly
- Analyze clicks on shortened links
These features only scratch the surface of what Hootsuite provides to paying customers and if you need more you can take up a HootSuite Pro account for a 30-day free trial to explore unlimited profiles, team members and many more statistics.
How to Add a Social Network Profile to Hootsuite
You can connect multiple social network profiles to your HootSuite account, and then monitor and send updates to these social networks.
http://goo.gl/BLT45
How to Schedule a Message with Hootsuite
HootSuite allows you to schedule messages to be sent out later. To schedule a message, follow these steps:
Scheduling tweets is a good way to market prior posts with the addition of different titles and or keywords as well as hashtags. Many times when you write a post people have a number of keyword searches that they use to arrive on your page. Even if you’re using due diligence while researching keywords it’s often hard to determine what keyword phrase or grouping will trigger the most traffic. By retweeing prior posts with Hootsuite you can get them in front of the eyes of your followers that may have missed it before. Not only that, but you can and should try different keyphrases in order to generate more targeted traffic.
For example, you may find, after looking through Google Analytics, that the way people were finding a certain post was by entering keywords or phrasses that you have not optimized for. So when you re-schedule a tweet, you can add the keywords that you missed out on the first time round.
By re-wording your posts you appeal to a wider and often different market. Not only will this be re-broadcast to your Twitter followers, but also be picked up in the search engines and aggregators with your newly rephrased title. So now that I’ve told you why this is important let’s look at how to do it.
- If you haven’t done so already sign up for an account and download the program at Hootsuite.com.
- Sign in to your panel and create your tweet.
- From this panel you’ll be able to set the date, time and social network you wish to post to. Right now Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace and Foursquare are supported by Hootsuite and new networks are added all the time.
- Once this is set you’ll see your tweet show up in the pending Tweets panel of Hootsuite.
It’s just that simple. Now you’re tweet is ready to go and you can play around with the time of day you send your tweets out.
How to Add an RSS Feed with Hootsuite
Adding an RSS feed to your HootSuite account will push updates from the RSS feed to your selected social networks (this is an AMAZING opportunity to automatically syndicate your content to the social sites!). With the free plan, you are allotted 1 RSS feed to 2 social network profiles or 2 RSS feeds to the same social network profile.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits and usefulness of your very own RSS feed, please click the link below:
Hootsuite 4ever?
Everyone does social marketing slightly differently. I can’t tell you how other people do it, but this’s how you should be doing social marketing. And you need not invest more than 30 mins – 1hour per week. Will you be taking full advantage of social marketing? No. Not even close. But given your busy schedule, you’ll find Hootsuite will help you to get what you can out of it.