hi everyone my name's maddie and i work in the online education team here at hootsuite
and today we're going to cover how to get started with hootsuite and by the end of this video
my goal is to have your hootsuite account looking like mine so set up with different streams having
all your social accounts connected whether that's facebook twitter linkedin instagram
and also creating some content and getting it scheduled and into your calendar queue
so this is just a little sneak peek of what it's going to look like in the end but let's go back
to the very beginning and i'll show you how i set all this up so now that we've signed up for
our hootsuite account and we're in the dashboard we're ready to start monitoring and setting up
some boards and streams because it's my first time in the dashboard i've got this get started button
and it's going to lead me through some basic setup of streams so i'm going to hit get started
and it's prompting me to select a social network to connect so because we haven't
actually connected a social network yet they're all grayed out so i'm going to hit add social
network and because twitter's first i'll connect with my twitter so here i'm just going to follow
the prompts to authorize hootsuite to access my account so i'm going to log in and now we can
see that twitter has a checkmark beside it and it's no longer grayed out we've connected that
to our hootsuite account so i'm going to hit next and i'm going to add it to my dashboard
so you can see it's auto auto-populated a couple streams for me just to get me started
so when you're in hootsuite you have the flexibility to set up your boards and streams
however you like but i like to organize everything by social channel so i'm gonna start this first
board as a board for twitter so i'm gonna go over here and i'm gonna rename it twitter and so it's
already set me up with a couple streams so i've got the my tweets stream which is showing me all
of my tweets coming out of twitter i've also got this mention stream this stream is letting me see
every time someone has mentioned me and is having a conversation so i can immediately respond there
i'd also suggest adding a home stream so the home stream is letting me see things on my
twitter home page of my news feed so i can see anything that i may want to interact with and
i'd also suggest adding a search stream what this will let me do is it allows me to monitor
key hashtags or topics that i may want to be paying attention to so if i wanted to see what
people are talking about for example hotels i'll just put that in there and search for it
and that's going to show me every time that hashtag hotels has been mentioned across twitter
so i've got my twitter board pretty well set up here i also want to create one for facebook but
before i can pull any of my facebook information in i need to connect my page so anytime you want
to connect a social network in hootsuite it's really simple you just go down to the my profile
button at the bottom left of the navigation and then you'll see this social networks and teams
button so if we click on that it takes me to all my social networks and teams so you can see that
i've got my twitter account connected here so i want to add another one so i'll click on private
network and i'll select facebook and i'll follow the prompts the same way that i did with twitter
and i'll select the page that i want to connect and hit done great so now you can see that my
facebook page is connected down here along with my twitter page so to get back to our main dashboard
we'll simply click on the streams button up here and now we want to create that facebook
board similar to the twitter board that we created so i'm going to select new board
and that gives me the option to rename it i'm going to rename it first because sometimes i
forget there we go facebook and i'm going to go to the get started button on browse all streams
i'm going to change the network here to facebook and that's going to give me a few different
monitoring options here as you can see so for facebook i'm going to add my timeline that's just
going to show me everything that's on my facebook timeline i'm also going to add my posts so i can
see all my live posts and i'll add an app mention stream which is the same as twitter it shows me
any time i've been mentioned across facebook another interesting one is the scheduled posts
so right now i don't have anything scheduled but if i did all my scheduled posts would appear
here and it would give me an idea of some of the scheduled content that's going out
so now that we've got our facebook and twitter streams set up and they're looking really good
we can start to cover how to create a message so the first thing to double check before we start
creating messages in hootsuite is making sure that our account and settings are set up right so in
order to access our account settings we go to this my profile button in the bottom left navigation
and then you can select account settings at the top so there's a few things we can do
here is where you can add an image that your profile has a photo as well as you're able to
check your time zone here so make sure this is the right time zone for where you're working so
that when we do schedule posts in a second they're gonna go out in the right time zone
um i'm in vancouver so that's looking good for me the last thing you can look at is under
preferences you have the option to change the language you can change this to french german
italian whatever you like i'm gonna work in english today so i think we're good here
and then you just hit save preferences at the end to save any changes that you made all right
so now we've got all our searching and monitoring set up we've got our account settings good to go
so let's create a post and schedule some content for the upcoming week so to get started you click
the composer button so the composer button can be accessed here from anywhere in the dashboard
and the composer will immediately pop up and you can choose which networks you want to schedule
to so i'm going to schedule to facebook and twitter simultaneously for this post and once
i have the channel selected i can add in my text and any links that i want to direct my audience to
so right away you'll see that because i've added in a link i get this immediate preview
of how it would look but if you don't like this photo or you want to swap it for your own photo
or a photo from our free library of photos you're totally able to do that so if you want to upload
your own you would just go here drag and drop your file or click to upload from your computer
or you have the option you can go to open media library and here you have access to
our stock image library so because i'm doing a post about travel i'm going to search travel
within this library i'm going to find a photo that i like i like this one so i'm going to select it
and if i close this now i can see that that photo has replaced the photo that was there before
i can also preview what this post is going to look like on each network before it goes out so
i can see the cropping and how it differs from platform to platform so one thing that i have
noticed as i'm looking at this post is that my link looks pretty long and clunky hootsuite does
have an automatic link shortener built in so all you have to do is select shorten with ally
and once we select that we see that the link is automatically condensed over in the preview
section it looks way cleaner to my audience and it also uses less characters which can
be really helpful if you're sharing to twitter um and just a note here that the updated link
is going to appear in the preview but your original text spot your text box is going to
have the the original link in it so right now i'm pretty happy with how this post is looking
and i'm ready to schedule it out so to schedule i just go down to the schedule for later button
and once i select that i have the option to pick a day and time that i want it to go out so
let's say i want it to go out next wednesday at 2 p.m and i'll click done so i'll click the schedule
button and it'll schedule both of these posts for that time so now i've scheduled that post we can
actually see it in this scheduled stream from our facebook board we set up earlier before it had
nothing in it but now we've scheduled something so we can see it here which is pretty exciting
all right so now we're going to head over to the publisher and view all of the content that we've
just scheduled so once we get to the publisher and the planner we can see this calendar and if we
go to where we've scheduled our content for next week we can see that our twitter and our facebook
posts are both there scheduled on the 9th when we scheduled them for which is really exciting
and you can also see there's a couple other pieces of content that i've previously scheduled so now
that if you ever want to preview a post you can just click on it and it's going to bring up some
details over here it'll tell you the network it's going to the schedule time any alt text that's
with it and if you want to make any edits you can click this pencil up at the top and that will open
up the compose box and you can make any edits as needed on the original post also if you click
here on these more options you can delete the post duplicate the post or move the post to your drafts
also know that you can just grab any of these posts and move them to a different date and
time to reschedule them the planner is really interactive it's super easy to make changes if
you need to great so now that you've got all your content scheduled for the week and you've seen it
all on your planner now i'm going to go over some tips and tricks that can really help with
the engagement side and the back and forth with people that may be mentioning you in your audience
and also how you can cater some of those searches that we set up earlier to be a little bit more
specific for what you're looking for so when it comes to engagement let's say we have an example
like this post over here where we've got someone who's asking us a question or they've been trying
to reach us on twitter know that you can respond right here so you have the option to reply
you can retweet with some other options down here and you also have the option to like this
you're probably not going to like it in this instance because it's not a very happy customer
but it isn't a good opportunity to reach out to them and reply so when it comes to that initial
hotel search that we made earlier there's a few ways that we can narrow this down to get a
little more of a specific search so if we click on this little gray magnifying glass at the top
it's going to give me a few options so if i choose to filter by followers i can drag this bar and i
can filter by follower size basically this will only show me posts of people or brands that have
a following of let's say 2 500 plus people also if i wanted to filter by any additional search words
i can do that as well so if i just switch this drop down to search and i can search for let's say
canada and i would just see posts that contain hotel and also mentions canada so
for facebook really all the same rules apply if i want to respond to any of the posts that
have been made on my timeline i can respond right underneath just like i would natively
we have a pool very exciting also if i had comments coming in i could respond there too
or anywhere that i've been mentioned so at this point you've basically got your hootsuite account
set up you've scheduled your first pieces of content you've got some great search streams set
up so you can see what's happening on twitter and facebook and i'd just like to add that
everything we did today was for facebook and twitter but you can also set this up for other
social networks such as linkedin youtube or instagram um we didn't do that today just so
we could focus on two things but i invite you to go explore those options on your own following the
same setup as we did for facebook and twitter here so this should make your day-to-day a lot easier
and allow you to be a lot more proactive um the last thing that i always recommend taking a look
at is the app directory so we can find that by going to the my profile button at the bottom here
and then selecting app directory so hootsuite has a ton of different apps to choose from and a
ton of them are free which is really cool so you can just browse free apps here by clicking free
or you can search for a specific integration so for example i use google drive a lot
and i can see that we've got cloud view for hootsuite which is google drive so
i can install that here for free so overall that's the way i like to set up my accounts
i hope you found it useful it's a really great way to start and should provide a really good
starting point to start keeping track of what's going on in your social calendar
and it's always helpful to remember that if you have any questions you can reach out to
our help center customer support or view any of our hootsuite academy content over here
so in our next video we're going to dive into some hootsuite professional features so a little deeper
on social networks bulk scheduling and editing photos using hootsuite analytics i'll put that
video in the bottom here when it's ready and you can go check that out later if you'd like thanks everyone!