Hootsuite – Your Social Media Hedwig on Steroids

I have to admit to you, I love the Harry Potter series and read all the books long before they made their appearance onto the big screen. I so loved Hedwig and cried like a baby when she was killed in the last book, the concept of using the super smart owls as message carriers totally appealed to me.

Think about it all those wise owls bringing us messages we need to hear…

But as usual I digress, story-telling can be carried a little too far and this is one of my battles in life is to reign myself back in and stick to the point as many of my friends will attest, lol.

Your social media Hedwig is of course Hootsuite your Social Media messaging owl and he’s not only cute, this tool not only saves you time and helps you to strategise your social media, it tracks your success as well!

Let me explain.

Once you have created your free Hootsuite account, you are able to create streams for all your other social media accounts and access them all from one dashboard including your Facebook profile, your Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn, WordPress.com. Foursquare, Mixi and Ping.fm.

Each of your pages, profiles and user accounts will appear as a stream on your Hootsuite Dashboards

And each of your Twitter or other account streams will show for each account you have on Hootsuite as you can see on my Twitter profile Tab on my Hootsuite Dashaboard my Main Timeline, Sent Messages, Private Messages and Mentions are all seen on one easy to read page.

One thing that Hootsuite does so perfectly is allow you to schedule Tweets hours, days, weeks and even months ahead which for many reasons can be such a time saver and allow you to market your services and products so easily. Images scheduling all your product or event launch announcements ahead of time all at once to broadcast right up to the big day!

Imagine knowing your marketing announcements going out 24/7 whether you have the time one day to the next, are away on holidays or working away!

This is one of the beauties of using the Hootsuite platform and all of this comes free!

Are you ready for some added extras?

The free Hootsuite plan comes with up to 5 Tabs or 5 social media accounts and the scheduling feature if you want a little more than that including: unlimited social media accounts, the full report builder, and include one team member there is a nominal cost of just $5.99 per month,

which means I can create ready to send beautifully coloured reports to send straight to my clients!

The time you will save using pro plan makes it worth paying the extra. Once you’ve signed up there is plenty of online help and guidance to enable you to make the most out if this product and to help you if you ever get stuck or are confused.

Using the Pro account and your company has several people managing the social media accounts, Hootsuite has some features that can help you with this – Team members can receive access to the social accounts without needing to know the passwords, and status updates, mentions, retweets, replies and direct messages by your customers can be assigned via email to specific team members to deal with.

Hootsuite also allows you to monitor your brand and track your campaigns. You can also create professional customised reports on your social media activity enabling you to analyse and adapt your campaigns accordingly.

You can use Hootsuite anywhere. It’s is available on the web, or on iPhone /iPad /Blackberry /Android apps. Hootsuite has two levels: a free level and a paid level at $5.99 a month. The paid level gives you unlimited account connections, unlimited stat history, Google Analytics integration, Facebook Insights integration, and removes the advertising. I’m all for free tools but at $5.99 Hootsuite is extremely affordable and price shouldn’t be an issue at all.

Overall, Hootsuite is a vital tool for anyone serious about utilising social media in their business. It enables you more effectively to view, share, network, manage, monitor, and respond to vast huge volume of information received through social media channels.

Plus there are loads of cool tools to add using Hootsuite including:

• Hootsuite Owl Bookmark tool
• Hootsuite Smartphone App
• Ow.ly URL shortener
• RSS Feed Autoposter

Watch this short video to see how easy Hootsuite is to use: