Social media is a wonderful thing. You can promote your business, product or services, you can meet local customers, or you can connect with classmates or colleagues from the past.
But have you ever noticed how time seems to magically speed by after you log in? How the 10 quick minutes you were going to spend checking your feeds has suddenly multiplied to 60 minutes? If you’re spending those 60 minutes marketing and developing relationships, awesome. But if you’re spending that time getting caught up in drama or reading other people’s blog posts, that’s not going to make you any money.
As great as social media can be, learning how to manage it so it doesn’t waste your time can be a challenge. There are multiple programs and sites available to help you manage all your social media sites, so instead of logging in separately to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, you simply login to one website and post to all your social media accounts at the same time.
And if you’re like me and get distracted having a social media window open all day long, you can even schedule messages or tweets to post all day long, even if you’re logged out and focusing on work.
Let’s examine Hoot Suite first.
Creating an account is super easy and it’s free so you really have no excuses for putting it off anymore. Once you’re inside the Hoot Suite account, you need to link into your existing social media accounts, such as Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.
1. From the opening page, click on the “Add Stream” tab in top left corner.
2. You will then see a dialog box open with a list of possible social media sites you can manage from the Hoot Suite dashboard.
NOTE: If you’re completely new to using social media and don’t have any accounts yet, you need to go to each social media platform first, create an account there, and then come back to Hoot Suite.
3. Click on one of the choices from the left column and then choose which type of stream (or feed) you want to see. For most people, choosing the “News Feed” or “Home Feed” are sufficient.
4. Clicking the “Create Stream” button in the bottom right corner will automatically create a tab for whichever social media outlets you have chosen.
Now, instead of keeping 5 social media tabs open, you can login once to Hoot Suite and still see what’s happening on your social media sites.
Scheduling Posts in Hoot Suite
A huge social media time saver is the ability to schedule future posts. This is important if you’ve got a product launching, want to promote your latest blog post, or want to publicize a sale on your products or services. This also gives you the flexibility to schedule posts if you’ve got insomnia at 3am or if you’re simply getting a jump start on tomorrow’s work.
1. After you’ve got all your social media accounts set up in Hoot Suite, click on the empty message box up top, next to the Hoot Suite owl logo. By clicking on the box, it will expand and show you the 140 character count for Twitter along with some icons along the bottom.
2. Type your message in the box, select which of your networks you want this posted to, and then click the Calendar icon at the bottom of the box.
3. The default date & time will always be current but let’s say we want this to post tomorrow morning. Simply highlight the correct date on the calendar and then change the time in the right column.
4. By clicking Okay, you close the big calendar box. You still need to click on the Schedule button once the calendar closes! Then you’ll see your scheduled post appear in a separate column on each social media tab.
5. Keep repeating these steps until you have a whole day’s worth of posts scheduled.
Of course, a big part of using social media correctly is forming relationships with other people who follow you, so you don’t want to rely solely on the schedule feature because that will ignore anyone who posts a question to you directly. But if you schedule a day’s worth of posts, then the time you check in to reply or converse with other people will be cut down dramatically, leaving you more time to market your business.
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I use twitter but never in this way, i think i may start to use hoot suit just stream line things in my business.
Great help thanks
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