As I have said before, I find Hootsuite an invaluable tool to manage the seperate social media channels that I use both for my company and also my personal presence. It is feature rich and allows real customisation of views, something that is extremely important as your searches and lists begin to expand. Using lists is quite important on Twitter. placing people on different lists allow you to filter out chatter that is not necessarily key to your strategy. It means that you do not necessarily have to wade through a long timeline of tweets to find the tweets that will assist you with content curation.

The sidebar allows navigation through the different feature screens in Hootsuite. The button just to the left is the streams button where your assorted stream tabs are shown.

Just to the left here is your publisher tab button. It is where you can view any posts that you have scheduled for publishing later.

The button to the left here is for the analytics interface. The one I use most is the click through analytics. In order to monitor these you need to use the link shortener within Hootsuite, more on doing this later

The tick button to the left is for assignments, a tool that is excellent if you are working with a team on your social media channels

The button to the left is contacts, your lists will show up here, if you click on a list the interface will show a bio of all the members with relevant stats.

The button to the left is of course settings

The spanner button, cute or what, is tools, on this tab you will find the Hootlet. Drag and drop the Hootlet to your favourites bar on your browser. It is a little gift from the gods of social media and of course Hootsuite.

The question mark of course is help, something which I scream a lot lately as in help my brain is running out my ears and help my ass is flat from driving 🙂

The stream tabs are invaluable, this feature is fantastic for somebody who is using Hootsuite for business purposes. It allows you to seperate out the social media channels and profiles that you are using. It also allows you to seperate lists for easier viewing. As I have said before, use lists in Twitter, it will allow you to easily view the tweets that you really want to see above the chatter. This is particularly important for content curation. It also allows you seperate out lists that you have manufactured and lists that somebody else has but you follow.

Posting from Hootsuite is easy, click on the compose box and it pops up, add your link and shorten it, pick the profiles you wish the post to go out on, enter your message and then, either send now or click the calendar button which will allow you to schedule. If you decide to retweet anybody’s post, a small pop up will appear with retweet to your followers or edit. If you click edit, the compose message box will be populated with the post in order that you can comment and then retweet.

To the left is the Hootlet in the favourites bar of my browser. The Hootlet is a fantastic tool. It allows you to post with an owly shortened link from any webpage you are currently on. So if you come across a killer article, just like this one perhaps, sorry I slip it in just on the off chance I’ll get away with it, you can share with a comment and link across all the profiles you choose. The really sweet part is that the link can be tracked in the analytics tab for click throughs. The rate of click throughs tell you several important things. That your posts are being read, that your audience found your post interesting enough to actually click through to see the content you were promoting. Watching these analytics help you understand what your audience find interesting.

The Hootlet at work, the hootlet is fully functional, it allows you pick the profiles, schedule the post and even better track the metric on click throughs. It is really a small piece of genius.

This post is just a taster of the features and power that is wrapped up in Hootsuite. Play around with it, read through the help sections, get familiar and then allow it to empower you social media strategy.