Hootsuite: A Social Media Manager’s Best Friend

By Devon Karbowski

With the increasing popularity of social media sites, most companies now offer social media management positions. Those that are put in charge of these positions are responsible for operating all of the company’s social media pages, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+. In order to make your job as a social media manager easier, the use of Hootsuite is a must.

Hootsuite is a website that allows the user to connect all of their social media platforms together onto one site to get the job done more quickly. There are many features that allow any social media manager to cut the time it takes to do her job.

Plan posts in advance
With Hootsuite, the user is able to program as many statues as she wants and then set the date and time she would like them to be posted. This is useful for getting part of your week’s work done right away rather than holding onto statuses that you know you can’t post for a few days. It’s also a good way to avoid forgetting to post something throughout the week since you can set up the status the second you know the exact day and time it needs to be posted.

Advertise your posts
There is a feature on Hootsuite that allows you to promote your Facebook posts without having to create the ads yourself. Hootsuite just needs a few pieces of information in order to create an advertisement. First, you have to select what you want your advertisement to achieve, such as increase website traffic, reach more people, get more followers, or drive engagement. After, you just select your budget and the rest of the work is done for you; even the posts are chosen by Hootsuite based on what you want to achieve with your advertisement.

Track trends and patterns
There are a variety of analytics reports that Hootsuite offers that allow you to track different aspects of your social media pages. You can get a detailed insight into the traffic on your site, such as the gender that typically visits your page or where they are viewing your page from. There are also reports that track conversations surrounding your page and whether or not what is being said is positive or negative. Some of the reports have graphs and charts that measure things like retweets and likes so you can easily find out what’s working and what isn’t.

Archive your posts
The downside of Twitter is that you can lose posts that become too old. Most of the time you have to rely on a new update to Twitter that will restore lost tweets. Hootsuite will save your tweets so that you can have them on file for later if for some reason you find yourself in need of them.

Whether you want to use Hootsuite to keep track of your small start-up’s social media page or the many sites of a large organization, Hootsuite has plans that can fit your different needs. Grabbing the public’s attention isn’t as easy as operating one page in this age of social media. To make your job of running multiple sites easier, Hootsuite is one option that can help relieve some of the stresses that come with being a social media manager.