Steve Dotto here.
How the heck are you this fine day?
Me?
I'm particularly well.
Thank you very much for inquiring.
Today I want to take on what I consider to be a fairly important topic.
We have this need now to be engaged in the world of social media but oh my goodness,
it is a time vampire like nothing we've ever experienced.
Checking Facebook, checking Twitter, checking LinkedIn, checking YouTube, all the different
social media channels that we have to work with if we want to be effective communicators
in our lives today tend to overwhelm us.
Oh, I left out Google Plus.
How could I leave out Google Plus?
I'm going to show you how I overcome the overload that is social media management and I'm going
to be doing that using Hootsuite, which is a social media dashboard.
Take a few minutes with me.
Stick around.
Learn.
You are going to love this demo today on DottoTech.
If you're anything like me, you have something of a love-hate relationship with the entire
world of social media.
While you love the opportunity to communicate and how much it engages us with our audience,
with our family, with our friends, you are also probably increasingly frustrated with
the amount of energy that it sucks out of your day, the amount of time that it takes
away and productivity that it takes away, not just from you but from your employees,
from your loved ones, from everybody around you.
They just seem to be consumed by social media.
Well, I don't think that that's going to go away any time soon so I'm looking for the
best tool that I can to mitigate the amount of damage caused.
I want the leverage the time that I spend on social media and have tools that make me
far productive in the time that I do spend in social media.
For me, the base of a great social media system is Hootsuite.
It's a dashboard, a social media dashboard.
that allows me to combine all of the different feeds coming from all of my different social
media platforms from Twitter, from LinkedIn, from Facebook.
It allows me to bring all of the information into one place and also to distribute to those
platforms from a single place so I don't have to open each of those apps each time that
I want to communicate in that space.
Now if looking at the screen and hearing what just I said about the social media dashboard
makes your eyes spin back in your head because you don't quite understand what I'm talking
about, I recommend you stop watching this video and instead watch the video that I'm
posting over my shoulder.
That video is an introductory video to Hootsuite and social media dashboards.
It will be worth you taking ten minutes following that one through.
It will give you a good understanding of what a social media dashboard is before we move
ahead.
If you are still with me and you understand what a social media dashboard is, let's move
into how Hootsuite will basically improve your productivity and your communications
capabilities while you are in social media.
So for me, Hootsuite is a daily visit.
Every morning after I've done my email and in my own routine, I open up Hootesuite and
I pre-package all of the different marketing-type posts that I'm going to send that day.
Now this isn't for the conversational stuff.
Conversational stuff goes on through the day because you have to wait for a reply before
you can have a conversation.
But this is for the marketing type messages, to promote videos that I've just produced,
to promote and let people know about upcoming courses and encourage them to sign up for
webinars that I deliver, that sort of stuff.
On a daily basis, I want to use all of my different social media platforms to encourage
and to build my market and my brand.
Now if I would have to go into Twitter and post several times a day and go into Facebook
and post several times a day, every time I go in that's a huge time commitment.
You think about changing what you're doing, launching the application, logging in, composing
the post and posting the post.
It's a lot of work.
Instead, because so often the messaging is similar, what I'm going to be posting in Google
Plus is so similar to what I want to post on Facebook, it's much more efficient for
me to do it all at once and I do it right from within Hootsuite.
Now if we take a look at my Hootsuite feeds here, you probably recognize what they represent.
I've got a Twitter feed here and my home feed, which is all the information coming.
This is all the different mentions, the times that I mention so that I can monitor my brand
as I'm going and this is where through the day I'll often check the mentions within Hootsuite
to make sure that I'm on top of any conversation that I should be having.
But here's where Hootsuite starts to show a little bit of its magic, the notes field.
I've integrated Hootsuite with my Evernote application so I can actually go in and I
can see my notes that I've got within my Evernote notebook right here within Hootsuite.
I use this in a few creative ways.
Actually, I even tweet out and post out some of my notes as social media assets.
I can actually share them directly.
I can do that with my newsletter and other things.
It's a very cool way of using Hootsuite.
But it's for another video, that story.
I also have all the direct messages here from within Twitter.
If you look in the top left-hand side of each of these streams, it tells you what social
media platform or what tool is being used do here Twitter.
Some people use direct messaging within Twitter as a replacement for texting or as a replacement
for email, especially reaching out and introductions and that sort of stuff.
So there are all my direct messages there.
I also have YouTube integrated.
This is where it becomes a bit of magic for DottoTech because my main publishing platform
is YouTube.
I'm able to integrate my YouTube feed right here within Hootsuite which means that I can
take any assets within here and I can send them out to my social media network without
going back forth, copying and pasting URLs from within YouTube into the other applications.
I'll show you all that in a second because where we do all this communication is from
this little dialogue box up here at the top.
This is where we compose different messages and to the left side of that are all of the
different social network accounts that I have attached to my Hootsuite account.
So if I'm going to create a new quick post that want to send to everybody in my network,
say I want to promote a video that I've just produced or remind people of a video, here
I'm going to post one about Facebook Privacy settings—it's a very popular one—so there's
the text that I want to add to it.
But what I want to do is I actually want to tie that to a video.
I want to promote it on video so if I scroll down here in my videos, these are all my most
recently produced videos.
Right here—where is it?
It's down here somewhere.
Show more.
It's a little bit further down—Facebook Privacy Settings.
This is awesome.
See these tools at the top?
These are sharing tools just like we have everywhere in the rest of Hootsuite.
So if I click here to share this, it automatically generates a post with the title of the video
at the heart of the post.
Now all I do is I type in the rest of the text that I want, which is the little promo
that I have, "Are you on top of your Facebook privacy settings?
Probably not.
This is something that I want to share right now to all of my networks."
Now I'm going to show this right now so that you can see the sharing, you can see how it
instantly does it and how we leverage it into the multiple networks.
But typically speaking, I would not post this right at this moment.
Instead, what I'm going to do is I would use this scheduling tool which gives me whole
bunch of different options.
I can manually choose a time and a day for the post to go forward.
This is what I do in the morning.
I compose all of my posts and through the day I schedule when I want those posts to
go out.
So if I've got a new live show that evening, I'll post for an hour before.
I'll write the post in the morning, "One hour to go until the new show is on the air" and
then I'll post that for 6:00 because the show airs at 7:00.
Then at 5:00, I'll create another post that says, "Don't forget, two hours from now our
new live show is airing."
So I can pre-create all of the posts that are going to be going out in all of these
different social platforms and I can do that first thing in the morning and get it out
of the way.
I can do it once a week and get it out of the way for the whole week or for the whole
month if you happen to be that much in control of these sorts of promotional posts that you
can create.
You can also if it's a little less time sensitive when it's being posted, use the autoschedule
feature which will automatically slot your posts in through the day.
You can just give it an hour period that you want the post to go out if you just want them
to go through the business day or you just want the evening, whatever you want.
You can setup preferences as far as when the posts are going to go and then in the scheduling
tool within Hootsuite, you can actually go in and you can create a spreadsheet if you're
really bulk posting and if you've got hundreds of posts that go up because you deal with
large, large volumes of posting.
You can actually set it up with a spreadsheet that has all of your posts, upload them in
bulk and have them batch processed that way.
But that's beyond my ken.
It's not something that I do.
But you have the ability to do that as well.
This is to me the feature within Hootsuite that makes it worth using.
All of the different streams, being able to see all of your different information is very
valuable but this is the killer app.
This is the one that makes it work in my life, because now I can spend twenty minutes in
the morning and I can pre-plan all of my scheduled posts for the day and to the audience, it
looks like I'm active in social media all day long.
I'm reaching out to people throughout the day when they might be there to be able to
access it and I wouldn't have time through the day to think about it at 10:00 in the
morning I should send another post.
No, it's going to be done for me.
How effective is it?
Watch this.
I've got one post that it's ready to go.
It tells me within here how many characters I have left in Twitter.
I can add 70 more characters.
If this is just a Facebook-only post, I can still write a book and if this is a LinkedIn
post, I can add this many more characters.
It doesn't have quite as great an integration with Google Plus but it will post to Google
Plus as I will show you in just a moment.
Instead of scheduling it, I am going to go and I am going to cancel that.
Oh there we go.
I'm going close down that, remove the scheduling and send now.
There it is.
Send now.
Are you ready?
Send.
All right, so I've just sent out this post.
It will give me a confirmation message, "Message posted."
Shall we look and see if we were successful?
Let's go into my Twitter account.
Let's take a look at my feed.
There's the new post right there.
That's one with the YouTube video attached so people can watch the video right away,
which is what I want.
Isn't that awesome?
Oh it gets better.
Let's go to my LinkedIn feed.
Let's LinkedIn; let's update my LinkedIn.
There is my post into LinkedIn.
Oh, next one let's go into Facebook.
Let's refresh my Facebook feed for my DottoTech brand and there's the same post in Facebook.
One click of the mouse and I reached three different networks with the same basic content
and I can schedule it into the future.
To me, that is what makes Hootsuite a must-have tool.
Let me just jump back into Hootsuite for a moment and show you where we can go in.
If you need to make changes if you are scheduling, this is the scheduler or Publisher it's called.
I said scheduler earlier; it's called Publisher.
This is where I see all of my pre-done posts all ready to go through today and actually
through the rest of the week, most of these ones through the rest of the week.
I have a webinar coming up so I just wanted to create an ongoing—not overwhelm my market
place, you can see I'm just posting once a day and I could probably post more than once
a day.
Certainly into things like Twitter you can post more than once a day with the same idea
because it just goes by so fast that people miss it.
But I've just set that up so that I've got this continual presence in social media.
Steve's got a webinar coming up.
You might see it in Facebook.
You might see it in Twitter.
Once you've seen it a couple of times in my Twitter, oh I should probably take that in.
So I'm not just looking for a single homerun, having you watch my video or sign up for my
webinar the first time you see it.
I'm making sure that I reach across all of my different social platforms and reach out
to you with it.
As I say, Hootsuite to me is the tool that makes it work.
We can attach all of our social platforms, all of our different feeds to it.
Now it does far more than this.
I'm just touching on one aspect of using Hootsuite and that aspect is the sharing.
It's also great for doing research.
Oh, I should before I finish jump across and show you.
I showed you two different apps that I've integrated within Hootsuite -- my Evernote
app and my YouTube channel.
You do all of that through the App Directory.
Some of these are paid, some of them are free but these tools just really change how Hootsuite
works for all of us.
It becomes far more than just social media feed.
At that point there, it gives us the ability to integrate all of these other different
tools within Hootsuite and you'll find different ways to integrate them.
I could do a whole series of videos just on the ways to integrate these tools.
Oh look at that, they've got a new Trello app.
That's one I haven't seen yet.
Well, I have to take a look at that one.
So as you can see, there are lots and they're always changing the number of different tools.
There I am, being able to post to Instagram using it.
You can integrate MailChimp.
It goes on and on and gets better and better.
I hope that I've opened your eyes in this video to a way to use Hootsuite to leverage
and to save you time on a daily basis in social media.
I want to remind you there are three different ways that you can stay in touch with us if
you want to see more of our videos.
The first way is please subscribe to our channel.
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I don't think I'm going to make it to 100,000 but if you sign up as a subscriber, I'll be
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Also, I encourage you to sign up for our newsletter.
We post new videos every week and I send out one email each week which is a digest of all
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And with that, I am done for the day.
Have fun storming the castle!