Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media dashboards available today on the market. What makes it suitable for small business owners is its price – the cheapest plan you can get costs $5.99 and it comes with enough features, so that you virtually begin managing your social media accounts once you sign up for the tool.
What makes the tool better than all the others is its simplicity – with Hootsuite, you have only the features that will allow you to easily see all mentions of your product or brand and also to engage with fellow social media members. Lets have a closer look at all features available with the Hootsuite Pro account:
Streams
All of your social media profiles are organized in tabs and you have different feeds from your social media accounts organized in streams. In each stream, you can easily see if some social media members are trying to get in touch with you or are interested in your product or service. This makes communicating with your audience a piece of cake – you get a complete list with all mentions and you can quickly reply from the dashboard to every direct message.
Publisher
The publisher is another cool feature of the social network dashboard. It allows you to schedule messages across all social media profiles you manage. In addition to that, you can add a couple of feeds from your blog or other profiles you have and syndicate them all over your social media accounts.
Reporting
Hootsuite is great for generating detailed overviews of your social media activity. There are 4 main report templates available in the system:
Proposal Report – this report is great for agencies, who are pitching new clients. This reports generates an overview of the social media activity for all accounts linked to the dashboard. The report costs additional 45 credits, which are purchased from Hootsuite.
Ow.ly Click Summary – this report allows you to see how many clicks the shared content received using the owl.ly URL shortener. This is very important data for every social media marketing campaign and it will allow you to measure the amount of page views your content received.
Facebook Insights – If you have to manage the Facebook fan page, you will definitely need to get more Facebook insights about your audience. This report costs 45 additional credits.
Google Analytics – The best way to measure the performance of your social media efforts is with Google Analytics. This tool offers you Google Analytics reports, which you can use to show the benefits of using social media to your clients. Especially when talking about conversion rates.
Team Members
At some point, a single person might not be enough to manage the social network activity of the company. At Hootsuite, you can easily assign different members of your team to different social media streams. Marketing is essential for every small business, so without spending a fortune on tools, you can actually have fun while managing your social media marketing campaign.
Getting Started
If you want to get started with this social network dashboard, take a look at this tutorial video:
