Hootsuite is a web and mobile application that allows you to manage your personal and corporate profiles on social networks. The program includes, among many others, the following networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin, Instagram, YouTube, Foursquare, Mixi and WordPress. There are three versions of Hootsuite: Pro, Enterprise and a free version. The latter allows you to manage a maximum of 3 social profiles, while the Pro version manages up to 50 – extendable up to 100 – and the Enterprise version allows you to manage an unlimited number of profiles on social networks. Our recommendation is to start with the free version and, once you are comfortable and whenever necessary, hire the enterprise version, which only costs $10 / month.
Hootsuite: how it works
The use of this application is very simple and intuitive and will help us to schedule our publications and keep track of them. The first thing to do when registering as a user is to select the social networks we want to manage and associate them with our profile in each of them. Selecting the social networks is very simple, just click on the “add social network” button that appears at the top left, and choose the networks you want, always associating them to an existing profile. A window like the one shown here will open:
We can then start scheduling our publications by following these simple steps:
- Select a social network in the “Find profile” box at the top left. We will be able to choose to publish as a person or as a page on some profiles.
- Add a link to the publication you want to share on the network.
- Write a brief description of the content of the link.
- Select a date and time in the calendar [Marked in blue in the image].
- Press the “Program” button.
In addition, Hootsuite allows us to create a series of columns for each social network in which we can set different criteria:
- Scheduled publications
- Most popular conversations
- Active conversations in the groups in which we participate
- Company updates (Linkedin)
- Published messages
- Twitter mentions
- Others
Through these columns we will be able to monitor the activity on social networks, the impact of our publications and thus define and improve some aspects of our strategy, as well as respond and interact with users.
How to manage it
We like to make a monthly schedule and, at the beginning with each Client, establish different days of the week and different posting times so that later we can check which days of the week and which time slot work best on each social network. In this way, we will avoid having to be aware of the publications during the whole month and we will be free to plan those of the following month. Once the publications have been scheduled, we can manage and edit them from the Hootsuite editor. Therefore, even if we have done the planning for the whole month, we can always make the necessary changes. It is very common for new publishing opportunities to arise during the scheduled period that were impossible to foresee, so we will have to be open to it.
Keep in mind that not all social networks are the same and do not have the same functions. That is to say, it is not the same to make a publication on Facebook as on Linkedin, for example. The former is a social network in which people of all kinds interact and is generally used as a form of entertainment; while the latter involves companies and employees and therefore has a strictly professional focus. Therefore, it is probably more convenient to post on Linkedin on a weekday morning, when companies and employees are active, and on Facebook it works better to post in the evenings or on weekends. In the same way, the times of publication will be conditioned by the sector of our company. A company that serves menus from Monday to Friday in companies is not the same as a leisure company, whose strongest days are probably the weekends. For these reasons and many more, it is advisable to start publishing in different time slots and days, since it will help us to define when publications work best in each social network and thus improve our online presence.
In short, the Hootsuite program allows you to improve your company’s online reputation, without the need to be aware of social networks on a daily basis, in addition to keeping track of the activity on the networks. And if you want to access your Hootsuite account from anywhere, the free mobile app for iOS and Android is also available.
