There are a lot of tools out there to help with your social media marketing. They allow you to schedule your updates/posts and can automatically syndicate to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc. The best social media tools are easy to use and let you to automate the main processes. They don’t overpower you with too much functionality.
One a good comprehensive management tools for social media is Hootsuite. Hootsuite can help you keep track of your social media sites and manage them. It enables you to keep an eye on what is being said about your brand. It allows you to respond instantly. With it, you can view multiple streams from many social media networks and reply directly.
More and more networks are appearing. Since there are so many, it’s no wonder they’re becoming difficult to manage them all. That is one reason tools for managing social media have become popular. Many companies rely on them.
There are many reasons you should think about using Hootsuite. It can help you manage your social networking. Here are a few of them:
Multiple Streams can be monitored in one area- This is, no doubt, one of the key reasons you should use Hootsuite. With it you can manage a large variety of social networks. Currently, you can manage the following most popular social networks on Hootsuite:
- Facebook Profiles, Events, Groups & Pages
- Pages, Profiles, and Page on LinkedIn
- Google+ Pages
- Myspace
- Foursquare
- WordPress blogs
There are many more you can manage using Hootsuite. This can really come in handy if you have multiple Facebook pages or Twitter channels you need to manage. It allows you to post to multiple channels simultaneously, but you want to be cautious. Your audience type may vary on individual networks. Your followers on different sites may be different as well. Since you want them to find your information valuable, it needs to be relevant to the target audience. This can also be a problem because only 140 characters are allowed on Twitter.
Facebook, on the other hand, allows you to post much longer and more meaningful posts and include pictures and videos. You can also cross-post to your Google+ page using Hootsuite. Right now, it is one of the only ways you are able to do this.
There is a Team to Manage Your Social Media Networks—If you’re trying on your own to manage your business social networks, you may have dealt with a lot of problems when you try to keep up with things.
If you have a team of people working your social media marketing, there could be a problem with security. This means you’ll have to share your passwords with each member of the team to log on.
It can also be difficult to divide the management of networks equally between team members. No one knows what the other has done or when they did it.
With Hootsuite, you can elect to delegate responses to different team members. The administrator assigns the tasks. There’s no worry about one member responding to something that may have been responded too.
The messaging feature is also a useful tool on Hootsuite. It lets team members send messages back and forth. This can be great if all of the team members aren’t working form the same place.
You should know, however, it can be costly to use multiple team members can be costly. Smaller businesses may struggle with the cost. For larger businesses with larger marketing budgets, however, this may not be a problem.
To use Hootsuite, you’ll need a Pro account. This will cost you $9.99 each month. For this amount, you will be given an additional team member. Each member you want to add as an additional member will cost more. When you get up to 10 team members, they will require you sign up for the Enterprise account. These prices weren’t published by Hootsuite, but don’t be surprised if the cost for this is will cost approximately $1,500 per month. Here is the pricing structure if you want additional team members:
| TotalUsers | Description | MonthlyCost | YearlyCost |
| 1 | Free | Free | Free |
| 2 | Pro Plan | $9.99 | $119.88 |
| 3 | One Extra $10/mo | $19.99 | $239.88 |
| 4 | One Extra $10Second User $15 | $34.99 | $419.88 |
| 5 | One Extra $10Two Users @ $15 | $49.99 | $599.88 |
| 6 | One Extra $10Three Users @ $15 | $64.99 | $779.88 |
| 7 | One Extra $104 Users @ $15 | $79.99 | $959.88 |
| 8 | One Extra $105 Users @ $15 | $94.99 | $1,113.88 |
| 9 | One Extra $106 Users @ $15 | $109.99 | $1,319.88 |
| 10 | One Extra $107 Users @ $15 | $124.99 | $1,499.88 |
| 11 | Must Have Enterprise Account | $1,499.00 | $17,988.00 |
Customer Service Management on Twitter—It is up to you whether you choose to use Hootsuite, but the decision will depend greatly on what type business it is and why you have social networks in the first place. If you want to manage your Twitter customer service, it would be wise for you to consider using Hootsuite. It is very popular with utility companies or mobile networks because they can delegate messages to various team members which are managed by the administrator. On Hootsuite, you can save and keep your draft messages. This helps you if you have frequently asked questions like what are your hours of operation, and how do you get to the business. With these stored drafts, you can pot when the frequently asked question is asked.
Cross posting to your Google+ account—Remember, Google+ really helps with search engine optimization. It also helps you take authorship of your blogs or your websites. Right now, you can only post to your Google+ profile by using the Google+ website or mobile app. For updating and managing the Google+ business page you have a broader choice. Hootsuite works well here. Right now, Google+ API is limited. Hootsuite is one of the partners that has been given full access.
If you put in the update manually when you’re in Hootsuite, it gives you the full summary and thumbnail of the link. Since it will be more visible, you will be able to have more click-throughs, which is important.
Cross Platform Completely—This is something that is great if you can do it, however, it is not always a task that is easy to achieve. That’s why making Hootsuite a web app is really an advantage. It is easily used on Mac OX, Windows, Linux, and even on mobile platforms. If you have an internet connection, Hootsuite will work on all of the newer, modern browsers. One great advantage is that it has a variety of dedicated mobile apps. These are great to help you when you’re on the go. It doesn’t work on Windows Mobile, but it does work on mobile units such as iPhone, iPad, Android Blackberry.
Even if you don’t like using things like this on your mobile, it will be necessary if you’re working as part of a management team. If so, you will definitely rely on Hootsuite mobile apps. They are extremely helpful when managing Twitter, which is mainly an on-the-go social network. Since Twitter doesn’t have the administrator feature, if you share managing it, you have to give your passwords to all those working on it. That leaves you at a disadvantage, because it’s not a good for security purpose. It could allow your Twitter account to be abused. If a member of the management team were to leave the company under negative circumstances, it could really cause you many problems.
If you use one of the Hootsuite apps, each member of the management team will be using their own Hootsuite account. This way you can manage the social network for your company without having to share your passwords.
There is a mobile app for Facebook. Using it, you can easily manage your Facebook pages. One advantage of that is that you won’t have to share your passwords.
Free Email reports—Hootsuite will send you weekly analytics reports. These will be extremely helpful if you rely on Hootsuite only to manage your social networks. Every week, you’ll get an email from them with a pdf attachment. You’ll find a graph which shows:
- Number of clicks each day on your social networks they manage.
- Geographical information—It will give you the locations where the people are located that click through.
- Lets you know the top referrers
- Gives you the most popular links
What’s really great about it is that Hootsuite gives all of this valuable information free to everyone who uses their service. It gives you a good brief overview and lets you know how your social network sites are doing on a weekly basis. It does, however, only show Hootsuite managed networks. Unfortunately the report will only work for you if you always use Hootsuite to manage your networks. It doesn’t let you know click-throughs from other apps.
Can Connect Lots of Services Together—One of Hootsuite’s greatest features is it supports a large number of networks and apps. This works well and saves a lot of time, especially for small businesses.
Through Hootsuite you can post a quick update that will be posted to multiple Twitter accounts. It can also be sent to your Facebook profile and page, Google+ page, LinkedIn profile, company page and groups and more. If you need to get information out to your customers immediately, this can be extremely useful. The new scheduling feature, Hootlet, can be a wonderful time saver for you.
- On IFTTT, there is a Hootsuite channel. It allows cross posting from your social networks to your Google+ page. You can post on Facebook, Twitter, etc, cross post it easily.
