Social media is a great way for businesses to connect with their customers. Everyone is on social media these days, and even businesses with tiny budgets can use it to help their business. Social media seems like every business’s dream, but keeping up with your social accounts can turn into a nightmare. The good news is it doesn’t have to.
How to Save Time
Tools like HootSuite can help you manage your social accounts in one place. You don’t have to log into several social sites, bounce between browser tabs, and hope your social media efforts are not in vain. HootSuite gives you a dashboard to manage everything in one place. In Facebook or Twitter, you’re stuck with the standard interface. HootSuite lets you customize your interface with tabs and streams to build the dashboard that best fits the way you work.
For example, you can have a tab with everything you need for a specific account. You can organize streams for your
- Twitter home feed
- Twitter handle mentions
- Scheduled tweets
- Sent tweets
- Direct messages
- Retweets
- Lists
Other things you can do with Hootsuite include
- Saving searches as a stream
- Creating a tab with the most important information from all of your accounts in one place where you can scan first thing in the morning and know if you need to respond to anything
- Scheduling your messages ahead of time
- Viewing and editing posts by day, week or month in Publisher
- Autoscheduling tweets if you don’t know when the best time for the posts to go out
- Bulk scheduling tweets using a spreadsheet
You can get instructions for bulk scheduling tweets by clicking the “try the bulk message uploader” at the bottom right of scheduling options.
Find yourself replying to same questions over and over again? Templates let you save common responses as a template. Compose a message and click on the floppy disk icon to the left of the “Send Now” button. Now you can access that template any time by clicking the down arrow next to the floppy disk icon.
How to Find Leads
Search streams are a great way to find and build relationships with potential customers. You can find people mentioning you by quick searching for your business name or website’s URL and clicking the “Save as Stream” button.
The automatically updating stream will then show up in a tab next to your other streams like your home feed and mentions. You can add leads to lists to keep track of them and to help you engage with them. The Contacts page in the dashboard launch menu makes it easy. You can simply drag and drop people into a list. You can use the Hootlet extention for Chrome to find people tweeting near your business.
Using Hootlet, click on a location in Google Maps and a “Tweets Near Here” button will show up below the address. Clicking the button opens a list of nearby tweets and you can adjust the distance from 500m to 25km. You can then save the search as a stream in Hootsuite.
How to Identify Influencers
You can use HootSuite’s handy search feature to also find influencers. Quick search for the topic you are interested in and click the “Save as Stream” button. Click the down arrow in the search stream and select “Filter by…” Now you can filter by Klout score and adjust the minimum score by dragging the toggle bar. You can also filter by keyword.
This isn’t limited to searches. You can also do this with your Home Feed or lists. Now that you know how Hootsuite can help you, go build the perfect social media interface for your business.
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