Tweeting on Twitter, posting on Facebook, sharing on Google+, checking in on FourSquare, uploading images on Instagram, posting on WordPress--anything you share online with friends and family is probably going through some social media channel.
If you’ve got social media accounts, and most of us do, you probably spend a lot of time reading and retweeting and replying. If you have several accounts, it may be difficult to keep track of all of them. It can also be time consuming to share information over several social media channels when different friends and family members use different social networking services.
That’s what applications referred to as “Social Media Management Systems” can assist with.
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is one of these “Social Media Management Systems,” also called a social media dashboard. It allows you to read, reply, and even schedule messages on a wide variety of social media applications. You can even monitor certain keywords and hashtags that are interesting to you.
According to 7 Reasons Why You Should Use Hootsuite, you can manage all of the following accounts with Hootsuite:
- Twitter
- Facebook
- LinkedIn
- Google+ Pages (currently not personal profiles)
- Foursquare
- Myspace
- WordPress blogs
- Mixi (Japanese Social Network)
- Vimeo, via.me, reddit, StumbleUpon, Instagram, edocr, tumblr, evernote, flickr, get Satisfaction, mailchimp, slideshare, storify (via 3rd party apps)
- Many more!
I know that’s more social accounts than I have. I have five, which is still enough to be overwhelming to manage at times.
How about you? How many of the above accounts do you use? Is it hard to keep track of them all?
Why Hootsuite?
Above is a screenshot of my Hootsuite dashboard.
On one tab of my internet browser I can read and retweet on Twitter, post and reply on Facebook, and schedule messages for both--usually announcements of new posts from my blog. Mostly, I use Hootsuite for scheduling and posting messages so I can send them to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, especially on the Hootsuite app from my smartphone.
Hootsuite is regularly improving their app, most recently their UI. Hootsuite is now much easier to read and more image friendly than it was before. They also recently improved posting to both Twitter and Facebook from Hootsuite, making images and links more friendly on both channels.
Free Account vs. Paid Account
Hootsuite is free to use for up to 3 social media accounts. To monitor more than that costs $9.99/month.
For personal use, tracking 3 services with a free Hootsuite account would probably be enough. That’s what I currently use, the free version. However, for businesses, the paid account to watch more channels, and schedule posts for those channels, is a great benefit.
Summary
There are a number of applications you can use to monitor your social media channels. I use Hootsuite because I find it to be a useful, friendly, and free way to manage my social accounts.
If you would like more information, you can also check out 7 Reasons NOT to Use Hootsuite, which also has some interesting social management alternatives to Hootsuite.
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