How to use Hoot Suite efficiently for your Social Media Marketing
If you are a social media marketer like me, who are managing more than 5 social media channels, you will understand how challenging it could be to post fresh, engaging and relevant content to your fans consistently.
Hoot Suite is a social media management tool that can display all your social media content under one software interface. It has been one of my favorite tool to manage social marketing efficiently.
In this article, I will show you.
- What is Hoot Suite and how to use it correctly
- How to use Hoot Suite as ultimate listening tool
- Hoot Suite advance feature that can skyrocket your social media appearance.
What is Hoot Suite and how to use it correctly?
Hoot Suite is one of the most famous social media tool that many marketers are using it to manage their social media platforms. It is also one of the favorite choice of many corporate companies – be it a local or multi-national big brands.
If you are just starting on social media marketing, I would suggest you to sign-up pro planfor only $10 per month. In my opinion, it is a very affordable package to manage over 50 social media accounts under one roof.
Head over to hootsuite.com and signup using Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
Once you login to your account, you will be brought to your dashboard. The user interface is quite confusing at first, once you get used to it you will find it very useful.
Step by step to setup your Hoot Suite accounts:
- Add Social Account – You can connect to all your social media accounts:
- Twitter Account
- Facebook profile, Facebook Group (you need to be an administrator) & Facebook Page
- Google+ Page (no personal profile supported yet)
- Linkedin profile, Group (you don’t have to be administrator) & Company Page
- WordPress
- Organize your profile under different Tab & Stream.
This is how I organize my streams with different tabs:
- Twitter Tab, you can add Home, mentions, messages, retweet & favorite streams.
- Facebook Page Tab, you can add Timeline, message, and post to page streams.
- Google+ Page, you can add Home, my post and circle.
- Linkedin Page, you can add company updates
Different people may have different way of organizing streams, you will need to adjust the streams and tabs accordingly
- Consistently check through these different Tabs to engage with your audience.
I am currently managing more than 10 Facebook Page, 5 Twitter Accounts, 2 Google+ Page and 2 Linkedin Company page.
I will turn on my Hoot Suite dashboard daily and look through all the Streams:
- Twitter mention to reply
- Twitter messages to reply
- Retweets to thanks.
- Facebook post to page to reply or answer
- Facebook message to reply.
- Comment on my Facebook post
- Google+ comment on my post
- Linkedin comment on my post
How to use Hoot Suite as a listening tool?
You will need to post relevant news, updates, jokes, quotes, meme and other engaging topic to keep your customers engaged.
Hoot Suite has the ability to connect many applications and tools.
This is how I setup Hoot Suite as a Social Listening tool:
- Signup for a free account at
Set all these accounts up with the topics and keywords you interested (except youtube, scoop it and Instagram; you will need to manually search for your keyword inside Hoot Suite)
- Connect all these apps with Hoot Suite, under app directory on the left hand side menu
- Add all these apps under same Tab in Hoot Suite, named it as content curation or something you prefer.
- Include Hoot Suite Syndicator as well. This is Hoot Suite in house RSS reader, you can add all your favorite RSS in your niche.
- Add Twitter Search stream, where you can search for any keyword or hashtag of your niche.
By now you should have a customized tab that include many different apps that streaming high quality contents.
Every time when you need extra content for your readers, just go through these streams and search for interesting content to share.
Discover Hoot Suite advance features that can skyrocket your social media marketing.
Hoot Suite basic function is already a very powerful social media software. If you utilize the basic function well, you will already have a good starter for your social media strategy.
However you will need to add this two advance features to further boost your social media marketing.
- Sometimes it can be time consuming to find authority news for your audience. If you have an authority site in your niche that consistently publishing quality content, you can add the RSS feed to Hoot Suite. Hoot Suite will automatically publish new post if there is an update on the RSS.
Add your rss under publisher > RSS Feeds
In example below, I added http://backlinko.com/feed to my Twitter Account. Hoot Suite will check the RSS every 24 hours and will randomly post one of the update each time.
- If you are planning for a long holiday, and wish to plan ahead all your social media post, you can utilize Hoot Suite Bulk Schedule feature. You can scheduled up to 350 messages across all your social media account. For detail instruction how to do it, please refer belowinstruction from Hoot Suite.
Schedule multiple messages at once by using the bulk upload tool.
- Select one or more social networks
- Upload a correctly formatted .csv file
Your .csv file should include the following fields (URL is optional):
Format and Rules:
- Column 1: Date and time. The accepted DATE format is: mm/dd/yyyy hh:mmordd/mm/yyyy hh:mm Be sure to identify which format you are using above.
- Column 2: Your message. For Twitter there is a limit of 140 characters, including the URL (which reserves at most 23 characters)
- Column 3: URL (optional): The full URL
- Times must be set in the future (at least 10 minutes from upload time).
- Posting times should end in either a 5 or a 0, i.e. 10:45 or 10:50.
- Define only one message per time slot.
- Duplicate messages are not allowed.
- There is a maximum of 350 scheduled messages across all social networks.
You can find bulk schedule feature under publisher > bulk message upload.
- Remember to take advantage of Hoot Suite Suggestion features. Hover over publisher > suggestions. Click on settings, and key in up to 3 keywords that interest your audience and choose relevant social channel. It will then populate all your suggestion with scheduled content.
In a nut shell, Hoot Suite is a must have tool to be included in your social marketing strategy. It has a really affordable price tag, especially for those of you who are just started in social marketing.
Please comment if I miss out something, or you have some tips and suggestion for Hoot Suite function.
