Hootsuite Streams display content from your connected social accounts - offering an easy
way to engage with your audience, and keep track of social activities happening across
all your social channels.
In one place, you monitor things like post engagement, conversations, mentions, keywords,
and hashtags -- and respond right away, rather than visiting all your social profiles individually.
If this is your first time in ‘Streams’, select an option and pick which Stream you
want to add.
If you’re unsure, we recommend starting with My Posts and Mentions to see how people
are directly engaging with your brand on social media.
Click Add to Dashboard to finalize.
After this, additional streams can be added as needed.
Once a stream is added, notice that the engagement metrics for each of your posts are also visible.
From here, you can easily engage in conversations by resharing, commenting and liking posts.
Keep in mind, each social profile type offers different stream functionality - so what you
can do within each stream will vary.
For example, with Instagram you can reshare posts to your own profile from a hashtag stream.
And with Facebook, you can track mentions of your business Page.
You can also specify how often the streams refresh, and adjust the view to allow for
more or less screen content.
Search Streams empower you to undertake on-going monitoring of things like hashtags and keywords.
Once you set up your searches, the search results will be continually updated in the
streams.
Different networks can be actively searched in different ways.
For example, those with Instagram business accounts can search up to 30 unique hashtags
in a seven day period - and then easily join relevant conversations.
For Facebook, you can set up streams to monitor the activities of your competitors or strategic
partners.
You can search Twitter using relevant keywords or hashtags.
For example, monitor positive mentions using terms that include your brand name and the
keywords “love it”.
When adding search terms, do not use commas to separate terms.
Instead, use spaces, which provide results that include all terms.
To pull results that contain either term, type ‘OR’.
If you’re looking for a specific phrase, use quotation marks.
Another tip when selecting your search terms is to spend time thinking about how people
mention your brand day-to-day, such as popular abbreviations, as well as any common misspellings.
Once you’ve selected your terms, click Search.
After a Stream is live, you can modify your search terms if needed.
Within a hashtag stream, you can filter even further, by follower size or additional keywords.
Now that you have a number of Streams set up, notice that they are housed within a Board.
Boards are useful for organising streams.
You can add up to 20 Boards to group streams together by social network, campaign, engagement
or search type.
Each Board can hold up to 10 Streams!
Click a Board to rename it according to its content.
Now add streams, and social networks, within this Board.
Saving a Twitter quick search stream will add it to whichever board you performed the
search from.
Drag and drop boards to rearrange them - then minimize the pane for more screen space.
You can easily access your boards without reopening the panel.
Delete a board to permanently remove its contents from your dashboard.
Many Hootsuite users start out by creating a dedicated board for each of the social networks
they manage.
As you gain experience with Hootsuite, you’ll likely start organizing your boards and streams
in a way that best fits with your social media goals.