Short-cuts & Tools For Managing Social Media

Greetings Social Media Marketers

I hope that everyone is having fun engaging in Social Media.  I also hope that at this point you are comfortable with the main platforms and can begin to see how important it is to leverage these tools together.  But the question becomes, is this starting to feel like a lot of work?  Are you starting to lose track of where you posted what?  Is this more time consuming than you expected?  If so, you are not alone.  The good news is that there are some tools that we can use to manage our accounts.  While there's new tools being developed all of the time, I'm going to focus on two.

First I want to introduce you (if you are not already familiar) to Hootsuite.  (Is anyone using this already?  If so, I'd love to hear from you, please reply in the comments.)  HootSuite is a tool that behaves as a dashboard or control panel that allows you to see your social media accounts on one screen.  Not only that, it allows you to "program" your posts, for example so that you can schedule all of your Tweets for the week, instead of Tweeting real-time.  Second, it allows you to monitor responses to your posts and mentions.  This is critical so that you can respond to your followers in a timely fashion as well as monitor feedback of your brand.  (We will be covering more on analytics later in the course.)

Second, I want to show you (if you are not already familiar) with a feature in Twitter that will connect your to your Facebook account so that each time you Tweet, it will automatically make a Facebook post.  You can also set-up the opposite in Facebook, so that each time you post in Facebook, it will send a Tweet.  Now, these tools are extremely helpful, but you also have to be extremely careful.  It's easy to forget over time that your accounts are connected and you have to be very aware to practice proper netiquette, if you start to get unprofessional in one media platform, it will be broadcast to all of your other connected accounts.  As you can imagine this could be very embarrassing if you are engaging in disrespectful behavior.

While this assignment will not be graded, I urge you to set-up a HootSuite account and connect it to your Facebook account and your Twitter accounts to make it easier for you to complete the upcoming assignments which require you to Tweet and Facebook announce.  (This is not graded and is optional in case you are using your "real" personal Facebook accounts and don't wish to do this, however this is an important tool to practice using, so I highly encourage you to do so.)  If you decide to not use Hootsuite, then you will have to still manually make both of those posts like you have been doing.

For help on setting up Hootsuite please watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn6h9VrfWw0

For step-by-step instructions on connecting Twitter to Facebook and vice versa: https://www.igeeksblog.com/how-to-connect-twitter-account-with-facebook/

I'd love to hear from you... have any of you used these tools?  If so, what was your experience.  Has anyone use other tools that are helpful in managing your social media, if so what have you used?

Note:  Responding to this post is optional, the week 3 required post will follow soon.  However, I encourage you to comment with your feedback.

Happy Marketing
Dr. G