With more consumers relying on social media for daily shopping decisions, it’s essential for businesses to maximize their presence across different channels. Many Fortune 500 executives spend their time on LinkedIn, while high-level company decision makers read 45% of articles posted there. Outlets like Facebook and Instagram also continue to dominate users’ attention when it comes to helping decide what to buy. These are all reasons why establishing a social media presence is so important for your business.

Challenges Facing Business Owners

The sheer number of available social media outlets to reach potential business customers makes it hard for smaller businesses to carve out time for maintaining a viable social media presence. For instance, do your Twitter posts link back organically to Facebook posts made on the same subject? Were you able to generate a corresponding Instagram post as part of your marketing efforts?

Other Issues Faced

• Finding the time to make frequent social media updates
• Trying to keep up with the management of different social media feeds
• Figuring out if your efforts increase your reach in targeted markets
• Catching critical errors before letting posts go out
• Clearly communicating your business offerings to potential customers and partners
• Offering a variety of types of posts to ensure better engagement and relevance

Poor social media output can hinder your efforts to keep your business top of mind among your intended audiences. Can you say your current social media posts position you as a thought leader in the eyes of potential clients? How well do your posts showcase your value as a brand and the benefits you bring to any business relationship?

Your social media should reinforce your company’s credibility and reasons to choose your company over anyone else. How much does it help you stand out from competitors in the same market? Let’s take a look.

What Hootsuite Brings to the Table

First and foremost, Hootsuite is a time saver, enabling you and your team to focus on building the business. It cuts down the amount of time you’re forced to spend manually managing your social media feeds. Its management dashboard gives you a birds-eye view of everything going on in your social media channels. You can also use this centralized management tool for scheduling at regular intervals.

Maximize your time in Hootsuite by planning your posts in advance with the help of an editorial calendar, and once they’re ready, by using the bulk upload feature. You can schedule multiple postings at once by placing everything into a spreadsheet and uploading it directly into Hootsuite. Tasks that used to take 5-20 minutes to complete can happen in seconds. Your employees can use those regained hours of productivity in other aspects of your business.

Relevant Features

1. Calendar – You can drag and drop different items into the calendar for automatic posting. This feature makes last-minute adjustments a snap by allowing you to drag previously scheduled posts to different date and add in a replacement update.
2. Platform Views – These views give you a preview of how your post will appear on its intended platform before launching it. You can catch issues like a bad image in an Instagram update or a Facebook post that runs too long, before they release as scheduled.
3. Listening Streams – Create different tabs showing various trends from your social media updates. Target specific keywords to geographic areas and track their performance. See if your last Pinterest post drove keyword usage for a product as you intended. You receive real-time information on the conversation your business generates among customers and competitors.

Hootsuite enables your success through better control over your social media presence and access to tools for managing how your team operates. These team management features include:

• Permission settings
• Assigning tasks
• Sharing of assets
• Password security

Getting Started With Hootsuite

Diving into Hootsuite is relatively simple, once you create an account and tie it to your social media accounts. Set up typically takes about 30 minutes. Hootsuite is designed to be a self-service tool for smaller companies and one that larger marketing teams can leverage. It offers a variety of training tutorials to help companies of all sizes quickly train their staff on using it effectively.

Take advantage of the tutorials and information from Hootsuite and help your employees become adept at managing your business’s social media needs. They provide information in many different formats, including whitepapers, webinars, and toolkits focused on topics like:

• Customer Service in Social Media
• Social Media Marketing
• Social Media Management
• Social Media Selling

Close gaps you or your team may have with these trainings and become even more agile in developing comprehensive social media strategies. Be sure to check out Hootsuite Academy for different platform certifications.

Picking the Right Hootsuite Tier

Hootsuite understands that businesses have different needs when it comes to social media marketing and offers trials for different tiers of costs and features. Choose the tier best suited to meet your company’s needs. You can always move up or down the tiers as or if your needs change.

Available Hootsuite Features

1. Post Scheduling – You can schedule your social media posts in advance and preview them in one place to minimize errors and content gaps, and ensure accurate coordination across social media channels.
2. Fresh Content – Save hours of time trying to come up with new content ideas, since Hootsuite can feed inspiration to you and gather information within the application. You can even organize and save content for future use when you need it.
3. Provable Metrics – Create custom reports to measure your social media efforts and see what’s working or not. View trends of who’s using your different hash tags or finding your meta tags via search engine queries. The same feature can be configured to analyze the performance of your social media marketing team and pinpoint opportunities for improvement.
4. Conversation Tracking – Wouldn’t it be great to see what competitors and potential clients say about your company anywhere on the Internet? With Hootsuite, you can track any conversations around your business, and filter different keywords associated with your company brand. It will even notify you of any negative comments, so your team can quickly address the customer’s concern.

The Impacts of Hootsuite on Your Business

You will quickly see short-term gains when leveraging Hootsuite, like vastly cutting time managing and updating your company’s social media accounts. Pretty soon, your view and approach will change to how you handle your social media strategy.

Over time, you will see the benefits of taking a more strategic approach to your postings. You’ll find yourself thinking weeks, even months in advance instead of only worrying about this week’s posts or how you’re going to make time to complete them.

Taking a strategic approach helps create organic improvements in your company’s organic search rankings. Using Hootsuite’s management tool enables you to see and gain control around any conversation about your business and come up with ways to take advantage of opportunities to improve its perception.

Looking to make an impact on your social media strategy but need some help? Check out our digital marketing services to see how we can of assistance!

Source

https://www.marketingweek.com/2018/07/10/pinterest-outsider-marketing-gem/