How to use HootSuite?

HootSuite is one of the leading, if not the leading, tool to take care of your social media profiles and share information to different networks in few seconds. Not used it before? Find out how to use HootSuite as you read on in this article.

Last week I wrote an article about how to use Buffer. Now it is time to let you know how to use HootSuite as well, so I will let this article follow in the footsteps of my article from last week. Read both of them and based on that make a decision which one of them sounds like the best to you.

The social media problem

As a webmaster you will often find yourself with tons of Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter profiles, Google plus pages and profiles and so on, that posting a message about a new blog post or some quote to the walls of these sites take ages. A solution to this social media problem and chaos is to use a tool such as HootSuite or Buffer, and here you will find out what HootSuite can do for you.

What HootSuite can do for you?

To sign up for HootSuite is free and it can be done at the HootSuite website. The basic free version gives you the right to add five social media profiles for free and you can add two feeds. The first time you log unto HootSuite you might feel overwhelmed. It looks like a giant chaos and it takes some time just to get your air back and calm down. But, once you have gotten the air back and you are ready to move on, you will find out that it isn’t as hard as it looks.

In the start you should add a social media network to your profile. If you have a website with a Facebook, Google plus and a Twitter profile you could add these three. Now that you have those ready and added, you can try to send a message to Google+, Twitter and Facebook at the same time, from HootSuite. Type your message in the “compose your message” field at the top of the site, select the three profiles to the right of where you type your message. Press send or you could schedule your post for a later time.

Managing tabs and streams in HootSuite

You have just sent your first message to different social media profiles using HootSuite. Let us now look into another function in HootSuite. At the Home Site you will find the change not only to add social networks, but also to add streams. Say you have that one website with three social media profiles, you can now create a tab with the name of your site.

Once you have created the tab add streams. An example of a stream is “Mentions” on Twitter, your Google+ home stream and so on. Using these you can easily see what is happening to the message you send and administer your social media profiles from inside the HootSuite dashboard.

How to use HootSuite for publishing

It is easy to publish to your social media networks from HootSuite. Here you can see scheduled posts, you can upload bulk messages and you can add streams which will auto publish to social media profiles. In the free version you are only allowed to add two feeds to be auto-published. This works fine, but the Facebook auto publish often chooses terrible pictures or none. Personally I do not use feeds anymore, because it is so easy to post things to all social media profiles using the compose message field, and as I do so I have full control of text, the thumbnail used and I can also use hashtags, so I do not auto publish feeds myself anymore.

These are the most HootSuite functions

To me these were the most important HootSuite functions as I first started using it. They still are, but there are more functions found inside this tool as well. If you work in a larger company you can share information between users and administer tasks to one another inside the tool. The function that I still really liked inside HootSuite was the reports.

Is your social media work fruitful?

It took me some time before I discovered this, but HootSuite can create some reports easily telling you about whether people click your links or not, whether your tweets are retweeted or not and much, much more. You can connect HootSuite even to your Google Analytics account and create very detailed and very professional looking reports including tons of information, but such reports might demand that you use more money a month.

This was just a short introduction dealing with how to use HootSuite. I hoe you have found it helpful. If you have further questions or comments, just share them here. If you want to visit HootSuite and sign up for your own free account or maybe get a subscription costing about 10 USD a month allowed you to add 50 social media profiles and unlimited amount of feeds, visit HootSuite now.