Today, managing a business’s social media presence can easily turn into a full time job. If you post the same content across several different social media platforms, it will quickly become a very repetitive, time consuming and mind numbing activity with very little reward.
As a digital marketing agency in Cheshire, we are always for tools that are designed to help the growth of small businesses. If you feel you don’t spend enough time, or too much with little reward, promoting your brand on social media, we may have found the tool perfect for you.
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is social media management tool that is designed to help brands and small businesses keep on top of their social media activity across several social media platforms from one dashboard. Users can easily connect social media accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest
As a social media management tool, Hootsuite is designed to help you do more with your social media. Users can manage all social media in one place with scheduled posts; analyse analytical information, identify prospects and offer customer support.
So is Hootsuite free to use?
Yes, Hootsuite offers a free version to use. The free plan provides 1 user login who can manage up to 3 social media business profiles. Free plan customers can also schedule up to the limit of 30 posts. As soon as one of those scheduled posts has been published (or deleted,) you will be able to schedule another one.
If you are serious about social media management, social media marketing and social media analytics, you can sign-up to a 30-day free trial Hootsuite Professional. Costing roughly £25 a month, this will allow you to manage up to 10 business profiles with unlimited post scheduling. There are also optional plans for team, business and enterprise.
Hootsuite – Features Breakdown
There is so much you can do with Hootsuite, here’s a quick breakdown of some of the most useful features that come with signing up for a free account. Please note, premium accounts offer more access, features and functionality.
Create content with direct posting.
The most prominent feature of Hootsuite is the ability to post texts, links, photo’s, videos and other media content directly to your social media profiles through your Hootsuite dashboard.
After signing up, in order to publish and/or schedule content and to monitor engagement, Hootsuite will ask you to connect your social media profiles, followed by asking for authorisation.
Struggling for content ideas? Well Hootsuite will help you discover new content to report. By creating ‘streams’ of #hashtags, locations or keywords, Hootsuite will find compelling content you can share or use as inspiration to create your next post.
Save time by scheduling your social posts
No time to post content or engage with customers on your social media channels throughout the day? Post scheduling allows you to easily maintain a social presence 24/7 by automatically scheduling up to 30 social media posts at once, across all your social accounts.
To schedule social media posts, simply navigate to ‘Publisher’ tab on the left-hand menu bar. Simply select ‘New Post’, then select which social media platforms you want to share the same post on. Once you have added your text, links and any relevant #hastags, simply add your media. Finally, select your date and then schedule in a time and it’s as easy as that.
Personally speaking as somebody who runs our Knutsford web design agency social media account, I found this feature by far the most beneficial.
Measure your social media success.
Do you like to track your results? Hootsuite have created a dedicated section for creating analytical reports and click summaries. Integrated with both Analytics and Facebook Insights, this will allow you to analyse your data and see what type of content best works for you as a business and which platforms users better engage with you on.
As a digital agency in Cheshire, we often like to share our success and results with clients and with the team in our office. Hootsuite allows export analytical data in Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and CSV formats.
Note – If you upgrade to the paid features, you can create and customize reports with over 200 different metrics to measure.
Other Hootsuite Features
As a digital marketing agency who look to provide free tools and advise, the purpose of this article was to highlight all the features found when using a free account. If you decided to take the free trail or sign up to one of the plans, other Hootsuite features include;
- Collaborative team management
- Set team members with permission levels
- Create, manage and remove tasks and assignments
- Monitor all your inbox messages from various social media accounts
- Security notification alerts
Get started today
If you feel like Hootsuite might be the social media management tool you were looking for, I would highly recommend trying the free account to see if it helps increase your digital marketing activity. If you would like some assistance creating your account, or managing your account, why not get in touch? We are a digital marketing agency based in Cheshire who want to help the growth of your website.