Steve Dotto here.
I’m glad you’re joining me today.
Today’s topic is Hootsuite, my favorite social media dashboard.
Now if you know what a social media dashboard is and understand the concept then stick around
and watch this because this video is a short overview of all of what I consider to be the
top three main features that are built into Hootsuite that make it indispensable for me.
If you’ve never used a social media dashboard before and don’t really know anything about
Hootsuite then I want you to instead of watching this video, click on the video right beneath
me, which is essentially the same content as I’m about to deliver here but in an elongated
form where I explain all of the back story and explain all of the different features
around what a social media dashboard does and I take my time.
That video is about 20 minutes.
This one should be six or seven minutes.
So if you understand social media dashboards, stick around.
If you don’t, click on the link right beneath me.
If you’re still here, I assume that means that you understand what a social media dashboard
is.
Hootsuite is my social media dashboard of choice and there are three main things that
I use that have become indispensable for me, the first being monitoring social media channels
and protecting my brand online.
When I look at the different streams that I’ve created within Hootsuite itself, the
one that my eye is drawn to as soon I open Hootsuite is the Mentions stream.
This is where I’m following all of the mentions of DottoTech in Twitter.
I do this partially because I’m full of hubris and I’m very interested in what people
are saying about me, but more importantly it’s because I want to monitor my brand
and if there’s somebody I should be thanking for doing a shout out for me, if there’s
a question from somebody within my audience, especially if there’s an issue—somebody’s
complaining about something that I said or I’m receiving some criticism, I want to
know about that right away and be able to address all of those different items.
So I always immediately gravitate towards the Mentions field right here, read through
it and make sure that I’m always up to date on what’s being mentioned.
And in the case of this particular post here from somebody I don’t know—I haven’t
ever actually met and not following at this point here—Peter has said some nice things
about my latest video so I want to be able to go in there and say, “Hey, thanks Peter!”
Right within Hootsuite, I want to be able to quickly be able to compose a quick message,
send it out to him, and be able to address, as I say, all of the conversations that are
ongoing.
It allows me to do it very easily.
Part and parcel with this tracking of your own brand, you can also use Hootsuite really
effectively to track other things that are happening that you might be interested in
business-wise, anything relating to your company.
Or say you’re writing a story and you want to cover some things that are happening on
the news, you can track all of that by quickly adding a custom stream here.
If we take a look right now within this Add a Stream, I can add it and have it focused
on any of these main areas or based on search.
So if I wanted to know what was going on in the Blackberry world right now because maybe
I’m going to do a story on Blackberry, I’m going to do a feature on it on the radio show
coming up, I could just type in “Blackberry.”
I could do some other terms around it as well.
But if I just do a search based on Blackberry, it’s going to bring back all of the different
Twitter and social media conversations that’s going on that people are hashtagging and talking
about Blackberry.
As a research tool, it’s very quick to set up new streams, to be able to audit them and
monitor new streams based on whatever happens to be interesting at that particular moment.
If you’re planning a new product launch or you’re doing some research on your competitors,
creating streams where you can view what’s going on in their worlds is a tremendous source
of information that will help you a lot.
How you choose to use streams is up to you.
The bottom line is it’s really easy to add new streams to be able to track information
right within Hootsuite.
That’s benefit number one: staying up to date on what’s happening, both in my world
and other things that I’m interested in.
The second major benefit of using Hootsuite is the ability to schedule posts and I love
this feature.
We should, if we want to be really good social media entrepreneurs, have our message out
there on a regular basis to our audience.
So we should be posting, 5, 6, 8, 10, 20 times a day into all of our different channels with
nice valuable bits of content.
That number of course is going to vary depending on what your marketplace is.
But for me, I’ve got a series of posts that I should be sending out on a regular basis
to people who follow me but I don’t have time all through the day to suddenly stop
what I’m doing, send a bunch of tweets, and then remember to do something a little
bit later.
It just isn’t going to happen.
Fortunately for me, Hootsuite has the Publisher feature which allows me to go in and allows
me to schedule ahead of time strategic posts.
Actually at the beginning of the week, I go in and schedule a full week’s worth of strategic
posts, things like updates of who’s on my radio show or reminders of who was on last
week, the videos that I’ve released, or speaking engagements.
Anything strategic that I know is a part of my business cycle, I can pre-program early
in the week and I can have a nice steady stream.
So before the week even starts, I’ve got maybe 15 or 20 tweets that are going to going
out through the week, keeping my brand in front of my audience and informing them of
what I think to be important things.
This is the easiest thing in the world to do and it’s great because you can sit down
and you’re in the mind space of talking about your business.
So Monday morning or even sometimes Sunday evening, even while I’m sitting down watching
TV, I’ll create a whole series of posts here and I’d send them into all of my channels.
In my case, I’m sending them to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Plus.
I deal with Facebook outside of this environment.
I write the posts here.
As I complete each post, I click on the scheduling button here and I actually manually choose
exactly when I want each of these posts to appear.
Then it populates them into all of these channels.
That’s what the little number three says here.
It means it’s going three different profiles.
It schedules it so I don’t have to worry about it and I have a nice, steady online
presence through the entire week.
I actually layer this.
What I do is I do all of this pre-programming of strategic posts.
Most mornings, first thing in the morning, I’ll add a few extra posts that are kind
of related to ongoing issues.
Then through the day when I pop into Hootsuite, if I see a post that I should be responding
to or a conversation I should be engaged in, I then deal with that in the immediacy of
the moment.
So I’ve got a nice layered strategy, making sure that even when I’m busy with other
things, I’ve got a steady online presence and Hootsuite facilitates that.
The last feature is one that I just absolutely love and that is they’ve added something
called an App Directory.
What the App Directory does is it means that Hootsuite is actually more of a platform than
an application because other applications can write code that allows them to become
a stream within Hootsuite.
So you can create all sorts of functionality and additional communication options based
on the apps that they write.
Scrolling through the App Directory will snap eyes open as to opportunities that might be
out there.
Just looking at the companies that have written tools to allow you to leverage their features
into Hootsuite is first of all a lot of fun to go through and it’s a bit of a voyage
of discovery because it’s not always immediately self-evident exactly what each one does.
But as you go through it, you’re going to find ones that you say, wait a minute, that’s
tool that I use a lot.
When I saw Evernote, I just full stop, I’ve got to see exactly what Evernote does.
I installed Evernote right away into Hootsuite.
Most of these have free trials where you can try them out for a couple of days.
But for example with Evernote, what happens is it creates a stream right within Hootsuite
that has all of my Evernote notes.
How do you use that?
There are a lot of ways that’s it useful.
I’ve got lots of additional information that I can copy and paste, or if I’ve got
addresses right here I can find them right within my Hootsuite stream as opposed to jumping
into Evernote.
But it’s the surprising benefits that make the biggest difference.
If I take a look in here, I find this is the last newsletter that I sent out.
I take each of my newsletters and I email it into my Evernote account so I have a digest
of them.
When it was sitting there, I suddenly went wait a minute, I could share that, couldn’t
I?
So I clicked here on the Sharing link, which then created this post for me which has the
short link.
It turns out that what it does is it actually turns the Evernote note into a shared note,
meaning that anybody can see it.
So it takes this nice big HTML document, shares it, and then creates a post that I can share
into all of my networks.
The net result is anybody who follows me on Twitter or on LinkedIn can now view my newsletter.
Let me just find it here.
It’s in my Sent tweets.
There it is.
This is the tweet that I have already sent out.
By clicking and opening the link, it’s opened up my shared Evernote note and anybody can
access this.
It has my whole HTML newspaper.
What a great and easy-to-access way for me to share some valuable content with a broader
content than it was originally intended for.
It’s these kinds of unique uses that really shine when we take a look at the App Directory
within Hootsuite.
Now social media has the potential to be a tremendous time vampire, just sucking energy
out of our day by having to check our multiple channels and deal with all the communications
going on in all those different channels.
A social media dashboard, especially Hootsuite, allows us to reduce the amount of time we
waste in social media and most effectively leverage the time and conversations that we’re
having in social media.
For me, it’s an absolute must-have tool.
I hope you found this video to be useful.
I’m Steve Dotto.
We’ll see you soon.
[END OF 3 Reasons You Need Hootsuite 10:06]