Managing multiple social media channels for your business or personal use can be difficult because each social channel is on a separate site. Managing these sites can take a lot of time out of your day, that’s why I use Hootsuite to manage AEA’s social channels, including Twitter and Facebook. Hootsuite is a social media management tool that helps you monitor your social channels and track what people are saying in the field. I have compiled a few ways you can benefit from Hootsuite!
Rad Resource: Monitor multiple channels in one place
The best feature of Hootsuite is that it allows you to manage multiple social media streams on one dashboard. The tool allows you to view:
- Facebook Profiles, Events, Groups, and Pages
- LinkedIn Profiles, Pages, and Groups
- Google+ Pages (currently not personal profiles)
- Foursquare
You can post and monitor your social media pages all from this one tool. You can even post the same content across multiple platforms. However be careful here—your Facebook fans and Twitter followers may have different needs. Also, Twitter only allows 140 characters whereas Facebook allows much longer and richer posts with photos and videos.
Rad Resource: Schedule Posts
The scheduling feature on Hootsuite is very beneficial especially for the busy professional who still wants to have a presence on real time social conversations. Hootsuite allows you to determine the time, date, and channel for your post. We recommend not posting too far in advance in order to stay relevant with your followers.
Hot Tool: Customize your dashboard
Hootsuite allows you to customize the information you see about each of your social media channels. For example, if you add your Twitter account to Hootsuite, you can customize the dashboard to view your newsfeed, mentions from other twitter users, your tweets, new followers, retweets, scheduled tweets, and the list goes on. This allows you to see all the pieces of information that are truly relevant to your needs.
Rad Resource: Monitor topics and hashtags
In addition to creating streams for your social media channels, you can create streams for keywords and hashtags which allow you to follow conversations in the field. By simply choosing “add stream” then select “search” or “keywords” you can enter keywords, phrases, or popular hashtags. Follow words such as evaluation, eval, data visualization, or #dataviz. Hootsuite will show you all of the tweets and posts related to this theme or topic. This is a great way to stay on top of the latest conversations in the field.
Click here to learn more about getting started on Hootsuite.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.