Steve Dotto here.
Today, we are going to talk social media dashboards, specifically, HootSuite.
Now what is a social media dashboard?
Well, we all now have multiple social media accounts.
We’ve got a Facebook account, a LinkedIn account, a Google Plus account, a Twitter
account.
We have all of these different accounts and we need to stay or we want to stay up to date
on what’s happening in each of them.
We need to post to them and we also need to consume information from them so it’s a
very time consuming process going from say, my Facebook page through to my LinkedIn page
and see what people are saying, see what messages are coming through.
Let’s go on Twitter, see exactly what’s happening, maybe I’m going to post something
in Twitter.
It has a pretty negative impact on our productivity.
I don’t think that our desire to consume information from all of these different social
media sites is on the decline in any way, shape, or form so we need a better way to
manage all those networks, at least the communication flow coming in and out.
That is where a social media dashboard like HootSuite comes in.
Now you should know HootSuite is not Twitter.
It’s not just a way to deal with Twitter.
It’s a way to manage all of our social media assets and so Twitter may come, it may go,
a tool like HootSuite can live well beyond because we integrated with other aspects of
our social media life.
I’m going to show you three things in this demo today.
The first thing I am going to show you is how to basically set up your different accounts
so that you can access your different social media accounts within HootSuite.
Then, I’ll show you how we consume information on HootSuite, how we follow and track the
content that flows in, be they tweets, be they Facebook status updates, how we track
the information coming in and manage it in a really good way.
Finally, I’ll show you how we share information, how we tweet back out or post back out using
HootSuite so we don’t have to go to in each of those applications independently.
Let’s begin with starting HootSuite.
When you sign up, HootSuite is free.
There are premium versions, I’ll explain to you where the thresholds are for the premium
versions a little bit later, but you just basically go to HootSuite.com, you sign up
for an account using one of your social media accounts, and then it creates the account
for you.
As soon as you’ve created the account, it will open then in your web browser regardless
of what platform you’re on or what web browser you’re using, and through the web browser
is the best way to manage your HootSuite account.
Having said that, once you set up your HootSuite account, you can then download the app to
your iPhone, to your Android phone, to your iPad or other tablet, and you can access HootSuite
and use all of the HootSuite tools from all those mobility applications.
In fact, I think those applications would make a great subject for some future demo
and so I will make a note to myself to do that.
Once you set it up, then you need to start connecting all of your different social media
assets and you can see my accounts here.
Now my account’s mature.
I’ve already set it up so yours won’t look like this when you start.
It will be much more Spartan and some people have vastly more complicated than mine but
the way we begin is just by going into our account.
I’m going to click on Steve Dotto here and this is where I link HootSuite to all of my
different social media accounts.
You can see along in the icons along the top or here that I have connected it with four
different accounts.
Now on the free version, you can hook HootSuite up with up to five of your different social
media accounts and then if you want it connected with more social media accounts beyond that,
it costs $10 dollars a month and that kind of gets into the more business versions of
HootSuite.
But for now, I’ve got mine set up with my Twitter account, with my Dotto Tech Facebook
account which is my Facebook account for my radio show and for these videos, for my personal
Facebook page, and for my personal LinkedIn page.
Those that social media sites that I use the most and so those are the ones I am managing
through HootSuite.
But you know what’s growing in my world is Google Plus so I need to add Google Plus
as a social media network here and all we do–and this is how you add all of yours
at the beginning– is click on ‘Add a Social Media Network’ and up pops a dialog box
telling me exactly what social media networks I can sign on with.
Now when something new comes along in another couple of weeks and then it becomes a popular
social media platform, you can rest assured that HootSuite will be integrating it and
it will appear here as a selection as the social media universe expands.
For now, Google Plus.
I’m going to add my Google Plus account and here sometimes it seems a little bit voodoo.
You will often be asked to enter your account information.
In this particular case because I’m already sign in on Google Plus in some other areas,
it actually will find my Google Plus account for me and it will first of all tell me exactly
what it’s going to do which is important for me to know exactly how it’s going to
interact with my Google Plus account.
I decide to give it access and then I have my Google Plus account available as well my
social media networks.
It’s really that easy to incorporate it and add to it as a different social media
assets.
Once you have your account set up, it’s time to start using HootSuite and we basically
use to monitor all of the different information flowing into our social media accounts and
to send information from those accounts.
This is the main purposes of HootSuite.
So here when we go into our home screen, we see our social media dashboard in action.
Now yours won’t look exactly like mine because it will be just setup in a generic format.
We add structure to the social media dashboard right within this screen.
So I’ve got mine setup mainly for Twitter and I follow.
Here’s my Home Food.
These are all the different accounts that I’m following on Twitter and I can read
the tweets as they come in and I can stay up to date on what is happening on the Twittersphere.
Next to that are all the Mentions.
It’s a good practice to find out if people are mentioning you in the @dottotech convention
so if anybody posts anything with @dottotech, I know about it and I can respond to it or
I’m at least aware that people are talking about me.
I’d like to follow the world of education so I have an education stream here where I’m
following a series of different accounts that are posting interesting information about
education.
Now how we create our lists is really quite simple.
We can start by adding a stream by clicking over here but once we’ve added the stream,
we can manage who exactly we follow by going into the preferences for that individual stream
and I’ll show you that before we add a stream.
This is my education stream and these are all the people who I really like what they
say about the world of education and I follow.
If somebody stops saying interesting things, I can uncheck them here so I don’t follow
them anymore and I can of course, most importantly, add new users so that I can follow new people
on my stream as I discover new interesting sources of information in the world of education.
Now because this handle so much more than just Twitter, we need to able to organize
it more than just on a single screen or we’d have a massive screen of all of our different
social media accounts.
They do this through a tabbed interface so I’ve got this home tab set up with the things
that I look up the most which is basically the Home Feed, Mentions, and the educational
world.
I also have a Direct Messages tab.
If people are sending me direct messages and using Twitter as a communications tool, as
a person to person communications tool, here’s where this is kind of my email inbox for Twitter.
I also have a tab here for LinkedIn.
Now if I had to go back and forth and launch the web browser and basically launch LinkedIn
each time, that would be more time consuming than having it all here integrated right within
HootSuite.
So here’s all of my different feeds within LinkedIn.
Now this is just the way that I’ve chosen to organize my HootSuite interface.
Some people might the way that I do.
Other people might say I’ve got a way more efficient method and I can figure a way better
way of doing it.
That’s great!
It’s a personal preference on how you structure HootSuite but it’s flexible enough to allow
you to manage the flow of information anyway you want.
When it comes time for you to add a new stream, if you wanted to add a whole new stream, you
can simply click ‘Add Stream,” you choose what account it’s based on, and then you
can start to build that stream out and it will appear as a stream and then you can move
it around.
You can put it in whatever tab you want.
You have total control over.
The last thing I have time to show you today is how we post information, how we use HootSuite
to post into all of our different social media accounts.
There are basically two ways of posting using HootSuite: we can create an original message
or we can reply to an existing message.
So here I’ve got an existing message that I might decide that I want to do something
with it.
I might want to retweet this in which case, I just click here on the retweet button and
then I have the option to retweet this post.
I also have the opportunity to reply to it, to direct message from it.
Now you should know that with direct message, you have to be following the person and have
them following you in order to send a direct message.
We can also send this to email and we have a few other options here as well.
But for the most part we are going to usually either going to reply or retweet existing
posts.
If I retweet it and click on it, the post is then copied in the standard retweet convention.
But here is something unique that you wouldn’t have f you were just say in your Twitter client.
I can take this post and not just retweet it here in my Twitter account, but I can retweet
it my Dotto Tech Facebook account, or my personal Facebook account, in my new Google Plus account,
or in my LinkedIn account, or all of them.
So I have the option to take the information that I think is important to share and then
share it in the appropriate social network of my choice.
So that gives us some really nice additional options.
The other thing that I really like about this is actually creating new post from scratch.
So if we were going to start a brand new post, I’m going to write in, oh, what I’m going
to write in?
“I want an iPhone.”
Actually, I don’t want to say that.
What am I going to write in?
I know what I’m going to say.
I’m going to ask for a straw poll.
“Who is using a social media dashboard?”
There it is.
So, I have a quick question that I want to send out to my social media list.
Now here’s a really cool feature: the ability to schedule a post.
Now in a lot of cases, when you’re only at your computer for maybe an hour in the
morning or two hours in the morning when you are thinking about actually sending out tweets
and posts.
If you’re in corporate communications, you want to be able to kind of batch all of your
messages together but you don’t want to send out in one fast stream so that you want
them kind of metered out through the day.
This is the way that I do it with my radio show when on the day that the show airs, I’m
tweeting out through the day who the guests are.
The next day when I have my podcast up, I tweet out occasionally through the day what
stories there are so I can attract people to come and listen to the podcast.
I do this all through scheduling.
I create a series of posts and then I scheduled the time that they go and HootSuite takes
over the responsibility of sending them so I don’t have to remember oh, it’s 11:30,
I really should send out a tweet about this or that or the other thing.
This is a great social media marketing asset within HootSuite.
Once you determined who you’re sending it to, when it’s being sent, you determine
exactly which social media sites you’re going to send it to.
So I’m going to send it to my Facebook, my LinkedIn, and my Twitter account and then
I’m going to Google scheduling and just send it now and so now it is sent.
So that easily now, I have sent out a post on all of those sites.
Do you want proof?
Why not?
Let’s go my Facebook page, let’s refresh it: “Straw poll, who is using social media
dashboard and which one?”
What about my LinkedIn account?
LinkedIn account Steve Dotto, “Straw poll…and which one?”
And finally my Twitter account.
Let’s take a look at my Twitter feed, “Who’s using it…and which one?”
HootSuite does far more than I’ve had time to show you today.
It is a complete almost ecosystem that works for all of your different social media assets
and it will continually to evolve.
As new capabilities in the social media world come up, HootSuite will continually evolve.
But this is a great way to—look at that!
The very first post just come back in and it’s a, they use HootSuite.
I couldn’t set it up better myself.
Let’s go back in HootSuite and here are our responses.
London Drugs in Courtenay, they like HootSuite as does Gary Ng, iPhone in Canada.
That’s pretty solid endorsement, don’t you think?
I hope you found this demo useful.
HootSuite is a tool which will do so much for you.
It really gives us an opportunity to kind of mitigate some of the productivity lost
that our interest in all of these social networks creates.
By using HootSuite, we can recapture a lot of the efficiency that we lose by being engaged
in so many social networks.
Hey, if you like, why not follow me?
I’m @DottoTech on Twitter.
You can of course subscribe to these videos and you can visit us anytime at dottotech.com.
I hope you found this useful.
Thanks for spending your time with me today.
Steve Dotto0HootSuite0September 23, 2012
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