Five Hootsuite Features And Their Benefits

Recently I had written a post about the five marketing tools I am most thankful for and I included Hootsuite as one of my five. Since, I have received multiple questions asking how I use Hootsuite and what some of my best practices are, I figured it might be easiest to respond with a quick blog post. I am logged into our Hootsuite Pro account every day, all day long, and I also utilize the application for my Droid smartphone. So how would I recommend using Hootsuite and what are some of the key features to use? Below I’ve listed five of my favorite features of Hootsuite with a little description of each.

Bulk Scheduling – I can’t say enough about the Hootlet application that allows me to schedule posts across multiple accounts. The latest feature that allowed auto scheduling was even more brilliant than the Hootlet release itself. Hootsuite can schedule your tweets based on the most optimal time for the tweet to go out when it will gain the most visibility. If you have a Facebook, Linkedin, Google+ page, and Twitter account, no problem, it can auto schedule on all these social media outlets. If you are curating content from other sites, then the Hootlet app will save you even more time. Most Twitter experts agree that you should be sharing other content besides your own, with your content going out in between. There is no better way to manage your posts then using the bulk scheduler.

Keyword Searches – Whatever the keywords are that your organizations ranks for, add them into a stream on Hootsuite so you can monitor in real time what is being said by your industry peers or potential prospects. This is a great social prospecting and nurturing featuring that will keep you and your sales team abreast of what is being talked about right now. The maximum number of keywords per stream is three, so if you have a lot of keywords to add, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro version or pick the three that matter most to your organization and monitor those.

Teams and Organizations – For larger companies the teams and organization feature will be one of your favorite. You have the ability to limit user access to the social accounts so that only the team that is working on the project can access the social accounts designated for that project. This is great when an organization has multiple twitter accounts for the different products being produced and is great for upper management to have visibility into all levels of Social Media activity. This is also a great way to limit liability when it comes to employees having access to corporate social accounts.

Reports and Analytics – There are personalized reports and statistics, with many different templates to choose from that best fit your needs. See what tweets are being retweeted the most and at what times, or see what tweets are getting the most clicks. Marketers are always testing and this is a great way to see what header is resonating best with your followers and what ones are sparking engagement. This is useful as well when you are developing Call to Actions for your website because you already have an idea of what phrases/words stick and which fall flat.

SocialBro– They recently joined forces in August and I couldn’t be happier. I use SocialBro every day as well as Hootsuite to see who has been unfollowing accounts, how the reach of the accounts are faring and track all the accounts engagements on Twitter. With the addition of SocialBro to the Hootsuite App Directory, I now can see all of the main information from SocialBro on the Hootsuite Dash. I can view any lists I had in SocialBro through Hootsuite, coordinate campaigns easier, and monitor new members of our community easier so I can begin interaction. You do need a SocialBro Pro account in order to have it appear on the Hootsuite dash, but I hear they are running some great Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals as well.

For me, Hootsuite has cemented its place as one of the main tools required for social selling success. Though there are other options available, my preference will always be for the little owl. How are you using Hootsuite and have you had any social selling success stories worth sharing?