HootSuite is the leading platform for managing social media. Our award-winning social media management dashboard allows you to easily schedule messages, monitor conversations and engage your audience across Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more.
Table of Contents
Hootsuite Social Media Tools
It is no secret that social media is important to building your company’s brand. However, keeping up with continual posting and connecting with your customer base can be difficult and incredibly time consuming. Is there a way to strike a balance?
Thankfully, yes. Meet Hootsuite.
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is an incredibly useful application for managing social media network channels. Often referred to as a social media management system or tool, it enables you to view multiple streams at once and monitor what customers are saying. You can post updates, read responses, schedule messages, view statistics, and much more. Many international brands—including Coca-Cola and Sony Music—utilize this timesaving approach to social media marketing.
7 Key Benefits of Using Hootsuite to Manage Your Company’s Social Media Presence:
1. Monitor Multiple Social Media Streams in One Place
Perhaps the most compelling reason to utilize Hootsuite for your brand is that it allows you to manage multiple social media networks in one place. No more remembering pesky passwords or having to go to each website individually.
With Hootsuite, you can post updates, review responses, and connect with your customer base on over thirty-five popular social networks, including:
- Facebook (including Profiles, Events, Groups, and Fan Pages)
- LinkedIn (including Profiles, Pages, and Groups)
- Google+
- Foursquare
- WordPress blogs
- And several other platforms via third party apps (including Vimeo, Reddit, Via.me, StumbleUpon, Instagram, Tumblr, Evernote, Flickr, MailChimp, Slideshare, Storify, Edocr, Get Satisfaction, and others)
2. Schedule Posts in Advance
Another important reason to use Hootsuite is that it allows you to schedule messages across all your favorite social media platforms in advance. This enables you to create a solid social media strategy that encompasses crucial times when postings are most often read and get more followers to notice your content.
Simply pick the day and time that best suits your needs. You can then view scheduled posts in an easy-to-read calendar format.
3. Easily View Analytics Data
Hootsuite’s unique analytics feature gives you an in-depth view of how well your social media strategy is working. The tool tracks clicks across all of your favorite platforms, delivering them in an easy-to-read series of charts. Furthermore, Hootsuite provides other extensive monitoring and reporting features that allow you to create professional-looking, printable reports on your business’ social media progress.
4. Hootlet Plug-In Allows You to Share Information Easily
Hootlet is a terrific bookmark plug-in that allows you to easily share content across the web with your followers. This special add-on tool to Hootsuite sits atop your browser toolbar for easy access. When you find something online that you would like to share with the world, simply click the Hootlet button. The application shortens the URL with Ow.ly and inserts a small snippet of prominent text from the site into your social media message. Hootelet is just one of the many plug-ins that make adding Hootsuite to your social media arsenal worthwhile.
5. Social Media Listening
An excellent way to connect with your customer base is through social media listening—noticing what others are saying and bringing your company’s value to the conversation. Another great feature of Hootsuite is that it allows you to track key phrases and terms across other user’s posts to determine when your expertise could be beneficial. This can be an excellent way to bring in new clients, simply by being highly in tune to their needs!
6. Manage Customer Service on Social Media Efficiently
One reason many companies shy away from social media platforms is that it can be difficult to manage customer service effectively on them. With Hootsuite, you can view customer questions in one single place without having to check multiple social media sites. You can also store draft messages to post when a client asks a frequent question, such as store hours or directions to your business location.
7. Team Collaboration
Effectively manage your team with Hootsuite! This tool allows you to add multiple team members to the social media accounts of your choice, allowing you to see first-hand who is posting what information and who has scheduled posts. You can also control the ability to assign tasks, add collaborators, and edit posts as you see fit.
free social media management tools
Taking care of your social media presence is just as crucial as creating brilliant content for your audience. Not only do you share valuable information with them, but you can also engage with them, receive valuable feedback and ideas for topics, connect with other people in your industry, and reach out to influencers, among other things.
However, since there are so many popular social networks you need to be a part of – plus new ones are continually being added to the mix – it’s nearly impossible to manage all of those accounts manually. Fortunately, there are plenty of free social media management and scheduling tools you can use to make your job and your life much easier. Let’s take a look at the 6 most effective.
1. Later
Instagram is one of the most popular social networks, with over 1 billion users active on the platform each month. Later started as an app dedicated to Instagram as a scheduling tool, but since its inception, they’ve added support for other social networks and are continuously adding new features. The app has a strong focus on visual content. Whether you want to schedule in-feed image or video posts, stories, or carousel posts — Later supports all of these options. Later has a free plan available that you can use forever, but you get features such as analytics, saved captions, scheduled stories, and more for paid plans. Their paid plans start at $9/month.
2. TweetDeck
Those who rely on Twitter to get their message across will find much to like about TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free application that enables you to manage multiple (unlimited) Twitter accounts from a unified interface. You can create your own customizable social media dashboard that allows you to send and receive tweets and manage and monitor your Twitter profiles. You can use TweetDeck as a web app, Chrome app, or desktop app. TweetDeck can be set to post scheduled tweets, build Tweet lists, and more. And the extra special part is that it’s always free.
3. Canva
Social media is increasingly becoming more and more visual. Canva is an excellent tool for anyone managing social media accounts to use. You can create designer-level marketing assets using any of the thousands of ready-made designs they have available to you. Now, you can even connect your social channels and publish or schedule directly from Canva. They have a free version available, which gives you decent access to great pre-made templates. The pro plan gives you access to all of the templates for only $12.95/month.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most established and popular apps for social media scheduling and marketing. You can use it to schedule posts, receive in-depth reports, and collaborate with your team members, thanks to built-in teamwork features. It enables you to view multiple streams at once and monitor what your customers are saying. There is a free limited plan available for 3 social profiles and up to 30 scheduled messages.
5. Buffer
Buffer is also one of the best apps for managing your social media presence and scheduling your posts. The app also comes with analytics tools that enable you to track your audience’s activity and figure out when it is the best time to post in the future. We especially love its Chrome extension, which integrates itself seamlessly and never gets in the way, yet it is always there when you need it. It is a more straightforward and more effective way of managing your social media, and you are never more than a few clicks away from setting up anything you want. Buffer supports over 7 different platforms – you can add up to 4 on the free plan.
6. Planable
Planable is a social media collaboration tool helping marketers work together better & faster. So, if you care for efficiency, this is the tool to consider. It’s one of the most visual platforms allowing marketers to create, plan, collaborate, review, and schedule social media content. It supports the most popular social media networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Google My Business. Planable is 100% focused on collaboration and approval so it allows you to get feedback on each post, have conversations, request & get approval, and schedule automatically. They’ve got a free plan to get you started — so you can test all the features for the first 50 posts.
Bonus Tool: ContentCal
ContentCal is the ultimate tool for bringing your team together. You can share ideas with, create approval workflows, build your content plan and then publish that content to multiple platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, and Medium). ContentCal’s analytics will help you understand your content performance and the latest ‘Respond’ features act as a shared inbox for monitoring and responding to mentions, messages, and comments across social media.
One of the star features is the fact that ContentCal integrates with over 2000 other applications so that you can create the perfect social media workflow by connecting ContentCal to tools you currently use (think of things like Slack or Trello) and also distribute content to channels beyond social media, like emails and blog posts. The best content is created together. Involve your team (and clients) into the content creation process, share ideas, gain feedback and watch your content performance soar!
While managing your social media presence and getting your content to reach a wider audience is a challenging task, there are some things you can do to make it easier on yourself. That includes relying on apps to help you handle the jobs which don’t require you to use your creative capacities, and that includes scheduling. We hope you will find these apps helpful. Good luck!
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines