- [Tutor] A course on social media tools
would not be complete without mentioning Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a powerful all-in-one,
social media management platform
that has been around since 2008.
So it definitely checks the box for reliability,
and it also checks the box for a multi-purpose solution.
You can connect your Facebook account, Instagram account,
YouTube channel, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest,
as well as many other platforms
and then manage them all from one place.
Let's take a look at some of the more powerful features
of Hootsuite.
Okay. So I've logged into my Hootsuite account.
And first of all, take a look on the left side
of the screen where it says My Boards.
Notice that I have a board for my Twitter account,
my Facebook account, and my LinkedIn account.
Now I've organized these by account,
so all my Twitter stuff is on the Twitter board,
all my Facebook stuff is on the Facebook board,
but you can create your own custom board.
So I could actually see my Twitter mentions
right next to my Facebook mentions, all on one page.
But if we look at just here for Twitter,
notice that in one column, I have my Twitter home feed,
so that's all of the people that I follow on Twitter,
I have all of my mentions,
so that's all the people that have mentioned me on Twitter,
then I have my tweets,
and then I'm also looking at a hashtag for social media,
but I could add other hashtags as well.
So you can see, from here within Hootsuite,
we can see more on one page than we'd be able to see
if we were just logged into our Twitter account
at Twitter.com.
Now the same goes for these other platforms.
So if I go over here to the Facebook board,
notice that I can see my Facebook timeline,
I can see people that have mentioned me on Facebook
and then I have my Facebook messages.
So one of Hootsuite's top features
is the ability to monitor engagement
and perform social listening, all from one place.
Now another great feature is the ability
to schedule posts in advance.
So to do that,
we're going to click on this little calendar icon,
which is the Publisher section.
Now, from here in the Publisher section,
we can actually click on a day and time
to schedule a post for the future.
So I could click say, tomorrow at 6:00 p.m.,
and then I can click Create post.
Now, when I go to create a post,
I first need to decide which account I'd like to post it to
and notice that we can actually post it
to multiple accounts at once.
So I'm just going to choose Twitter
but I could also click on LinkedIn,
I could click on my Facebook page,
and I could post the same post to multiple accounts.
Now, once we've done that,
we can go in here and we can enter our text.
So we'll just say something like, "Testing Hootsuite."
We could also add some media from here if we wanted to,
so some images or videos.
And then we could change the specific time and date
if we wanted to,
so if we want to do it at like 6:01 p.m.,
you know, we could change that.
And then when we're ready, we can just hit schedule.
You'll notice that it shows up on our calendar.
So tomorrow at 6:00 p.m.,
I'm going to tweet, "Testing Hootsuite."
So we can schedule posts
for all of our different social media accounts in advance,
right here from within Hootsuite.
So we don't have to go over to Facebook,
in fact, you can't schedule posts in advance on Twitter,
you have to use a third party tool anyways,
so why not use a tool like Hootsuite
where you can actually schedule your posts for Twitter
and Facebook at the same time,
you can really manage all of your social platforms
right from here.
Now, Hootsuite also has a detailed analytics section
down here at the bottom,
but you do have to upgrade to one of their paid accounts.
So I've been using a free account here in Hootsuite.
You can have a free account,
which is one of the big benefits.
Later on in the course,
I'm going to talk about another platform
that's very similar,
it's called Sprout Social.
Sprout Social is a little better with their analytics,
but they don't really have any free options,
so that's an advantage of Hootsuite.
So if you're already using Hootsuite on a regular basis,
it may be beneficial for you to upgrade
so you can access the detailed analytics as well.
But if you're looking for an all-in-one,
social media management solution,
you can't go wrong with Hootsuite.