Hootsuite: A Detailed Overview and Recommended Use Cases

It's no secret that having a strong presence on social media is important for business success. One problem we often face is the large number of social networks to follow and share. Handling too many makes it difficult to have a powerful presence on any of them. Fortunately, several services are available to help you manage multiple networks from a single dashboard. Hootsuite is a social media management platform for the web and mobile that allows you to view content from multiple networks at the same time, schedule messages, manage teams, and view analytics to enhance your content strategy. It has free and premium options and expansions. In this article, we will examine Hootsuite in detail, see its main features and consider some ideal use cases.

Overview of Hootsuite Features

The Free Plan will connect to 7 networks:

Twitter
Facebook
Google+
LinkedIn
WordPress
Instagram
Youtube

The free edition allows you to connect up to 3 profiles. You can upgrade to add 50 or more profiles. Add up to 35 networks through free and premium applications and integrations. Schedule publications across multiple networks, create feeds to display multiple types of content on a single screen, and share that content without having to search for it.

Create a team, assign them social networking tasks, monitor their work, approve their posts, and create a library for pre-approved content. Review your analyzes and get key information about your social monitoring. Develop either through upgrades or addons from the App directory. Many addons are free.

Import your complete list of contacts from all your networks and see who to follow. Create your own contests, sweepstakes and galleries. Keep your accounts secure with custom alerts and permission levels. Hootsuite Academy offers a lot of free training. You can also obtain certifications and team training.

Recording and Planning

Plan your messages so that you do not have to be online when it's the optimal time to publish them on your networks

Creating content is easy. Along the left of the screen is a menu that opens on the fly. Here you can access all the features. Select the Editor tab and click Schedule Message. This opens a content creation tool where you can publish immediately or schedule the publication. Just add your content. The links are added in a link field.

It has a shrink option so you can choose your favorite shortener from five options. Ow.ly is selected by default

Scheduling Manual

Compose your publications and schedule up to 30 of them to display them throughout the day or the week. Select the networks you want to publish, create your post, and then select the calendar icon to schedule. Select or deselect networks and add networks to this list. It shows the number of messages you have scheduled.

You can schedule manually or automatically. Manual scheduling is the default. To schedule manually, select the date on the calendar, choose the hour and minutes from the drop-down lists and select AM or PM.

AutoSchedule

To program automatically, activate it. This disables the schedule and optimally schedules posts

Choose the number of messages, the time interval, and the days to be published in Options. AutoSchedule

Scheduled Tab [19659024]

The Scheduled tab gives you a list of scheduled messages. View it in the calendar (requires an upgrade), edit or delete.

Planned Past

The Past Scheduled tab opens a calendar in which you can see all the articles you have planned that have been published. View by list, day, week or month.

Select any time on the calendar to open the content creator where you can schedule publications for this time slot. In the picture above, I selected Thursday and 11:00

More publishing options

You can also schedule the content from the mobile. A Chrome extension allows you to share links from the web without having to paste the link into Hootsuite. Premium plans let you download and schedule hundreds of posts in CSV format at a time.

Curation and Content Monitoring

Curating content allows you to quickly find content to share. You Can Follow Conversations Using Surveillance Tools

Streams

Streams show the contents of your sources. You can add as many feeds as you want. Each stream is presented in a vertical column. Scroll right or left to see all your feeds. Select the network to which you want to create a feed, then choose what you want it to display

It can display your home, mentions, retweets, subscribers, inbox, lists, mentions I like, sending box, your tweets, circles, updates, search, scheduled, etc. Create multiple tabs and name them to organize your feeds. You can even add new feeds from sources such as YouTube and Vimeo via addons in the App Directory.

Apps

Hootsuite has many applications that you can install. Some allow you to store content in your cloud drives, such as Google Drive and OneDrive, and access this Hootsuite content for sharing with your audience.

Other applications allow you to connect RSS to syndicate the content of the feeds you follow. You can also monitor the notes, the tone of the voice used for your brand, and so on.

Tools for Teams

The Enterprise and Enterprise plans provide you with a content library to store pre-approved content that your team can share. Create assignments and appoint team leaders with the ability to approve the content.

Analytics

The Social Media Analysis allows you to create custom reports for each network independently. Check out an overview of your Twitter profile and Facebook page, Facebook statistics and aggregations, statistics on LinkedIn pages, Google Analytics and Ow.ly's summary of clicks and stats. They are listed under Models in the Reports tab .

Creation of a report

In tab All reports of Reports click on Create Now. Alternatively, click on the template you want from the left of the screen.

Start from scratch or use one of 7 patterns. Three of them are free

I've selected Twitter Profile Overview . Here you enter the parameters you want. If you want to follow a certain keyword over time, enter it in the field.

It provides you with a sample report. Customize it further by clicking Edit in each section, dragging it to a different location in the report, or deleting it. Open each section to choose the profile to use

Click Add Report Modules to add other networks or other analyzes

The report can be shared, exported to PDF or CSV, printed, duplicated, edited or deleted. Export the entire report or just an item.

Develop Analytics

Develop your analyzes with addons. The premium editions give you an overview of your key indicators for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can create custom dashboards with the specific scans you want. Measure the performance of your team and see how long it takes to respond and resolve the messages, mentions and comments attributed to it. Premium plans add Powerpoint and Excel as export options

Recommended Use Cases

Here are some ways to use Hootsuite:

Stay up to date with industry news [19659022] Social networks are among the best ways to get the latest information about your industry. If there is noise, it will be on social media. The problem is that many industry leaders are on different networks or publish mainly on their own websites. Of course, this would normally mean that you would have dozens of websites and networks to explore and that this could quickly turn into disaster.

Use Hootsuite to create streams of those you follow. This includes not only their social networks, but also their RSS feeds. You can then share the latest news and trends and perhaps be considered as a source of information, increase your social follow-up and improve engagement.

Managing a Social Media Team

Hootsuite gives you several tools to manage small or large teams. Appoint team leaders to approve the positions of their team and track their activity. Pre-approve messages that the team can share. You can also place content in the cloud that can be shared.

Add internal communications applications, such as the Amplify app, and communicate with your team via Hootsuite. This allows you to work and manage your team from a single application, raising awareness of resources and announcements.

Managing Social Media Strategy From A School Or Business

Social media is a great way to attract talent. your programs and opportunities, interact with students and prospects, inform current employees and students about events, etc. Hootsuite studies show that 3 out of 4 students used social media to decide where to enroll in 2015 and 57% universities and universities use social media to raise funds from donors .

Companies looking for top-level programmers, engineers or other high-quality talents could achieve similar results by being the company to follow on social media. Hootsuite makes it easy with its planning and sharing capabilities.

Ending Thoughts

Hootsuite is a powerful platform. Even though it has a lot of features, the interface is always simple and intuitive. The free version has enough features for the majority of uses, but new features can be added for free or inexpensively through apps, or by upgrading to a premium plan. If you are looking for a powerful platform to manage multiple networks and organize content, Hootsuite deserves to be considered.

It's your turn. Do you use Hootsuite? Tell us about your experience in the comments.

Image from the publisher by Praneet Soontronront / shutterstock.com

The article Hootsuite: a detailed overview and recommended use cases appeared first on Elegant Themes Blog .