Blogging 101: Guide to Hootsuite

If you’ve been using Twitter for a while, you’ve probably seen people talk a lot about Buffer and Hootsuite. In this post I’m going to focus on how you can use Hootsuite to better your social media efforts, whilst increasing your productivity by not being stuck to your phone all the time.

Hoosuite works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google+ of which you can pick three to use with a basic free account. This can be three different Twitter accounts or one of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. It’s entirely up to you and why you’re using Hootsuite as to which accounts you’ll use.

Scheduling

On Hootsuite you have a limit of 30 posts to schedule across all your accounts at one time. Whether you want to post 30 tweets in one day, or 30 Instagram posts in a month, you’ll only be able to schedule another one once the scheduled post has gone live. Although if you’re live posting this does not affect your limit.

You can also auto-schedule using Hootsuite, which will pick a time within the settings you choose to post. To auto schedule, press the calendar icon below where you will write the content, and change the auto schedule settings to fit your needs. For example, I set mine to one a day within waking hours as I tend to auto schedule my  Instagram posts because amazingly you can now schedule Insta posts from your laptop!

Streams

Similar to Tweetdecks Columns, you can use different streams and set them up to how you want to see them. But to be different from Tweetdeck, you can see multiple accounts on your page by moving around the streams. For example, I have my scheduled posts for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram all next to one another so I can quickly glance over what content will be published soon on my main social media.

Follow the Conversation

You can also create search streams and find relevant conversations you can join in with. Whether that’s keeping an eye out on hashtags, keywords or specific URL’s. Use a ? after a word (e.g. blogging ?) and you can follow find questions about the topic. This can help generate ideas for your blog, but also helps you to promote posts that answer these questions.

It also can help you to keep engaged with similar people. Following Twitter Chat hashtags can help you to keep up with the latest posts, without needing to swap between your mentions and the hashtag search. With Hootsuite it’s all on one page! Plus you can take part in multiple conversations at once.

Twitter Lists

You can also create a stream for Twitter lists. Whether it’s for your favourite authors, people you know read your posts, or your  favourite bloggers who’s content you want to see regularly. Utilising twitter lists and keeping on top of engagement with certain lists may be your priority and Hootsuite makes this a lot easier.

Mobile Access

Hootsuite also has a mobile app available on both iOS and Android. This makes it really accessible to schedule content even on the go. Think of a great tweet on the commute into work but you’ve already tweeted 5 times in the past hour? Schedule it for a little later instead to spread your content out across the day.