HootSuite Social Media Dashboard

As valuable as using social media tools can be for connecting and engaging with your audiences, it can be a time consuming and labour intensive process. It takes time and effort to interact and engage with others online, but there are myriad tools, communication techniques and styles for creating and publishing content.

But social media doesn’t have to be all-consuming. One of the ways you can be more efficient with social media is to use a social media dashboard tool like HootSuite. Many Algonquin College departments and employees already use HootSuite to manage their College-affiliated social media activities.

HootSuite allows you to manage all of your social networks from one convenient place. Instead of logging in separately to your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Linkedin accounts, you can access and manage them all from your HootSuite dashboard. HootSuite can be accessed from any web browser, or via your smartphone or tablet. HootSuite has a free version that allows you to manage up to five accounts, and paid versions are also available that enable unlimited account management and team management.

Some of the key features of HootSuite are:

Manage Multiple Accounts
Managing more than one Twitter account and Facebook Page? With HootSuite you can manage multiple accounts in one convenient place. No more logging in and out! HootSuite allows you to connect the following social media tools:

Twitter
Use HootSuite to send and schedule Tweets, listen to your Twitter feeds using search, lists and hashtag tracking streams, as well as monitor Mentions, Direct Messages, Sent Tweets, Favorited Tweets, and more in convenient, at-a-glance columns.

Facebook
Post updates, add images, monitor feeds, and more. Teams can manage complex campaigns – including Facebook Profiles, Pages, Events, Groups, and Search. Learn more.

LinkedIn
HootSuite allows you to post directly to your LinkedIn Company Pages, Groups and Profiles, as well as create job search streams. Learn more.

Google+ Pages
Share and comment on Google+ posts, search public posts and updates, see recent user activity, as well as view comments and +1s. Learn more.

WordPress
Not just for microblogging, use HootSuite’s WordPress management to schedule and cross-post content to multiple WordPress accounts. The publishing platform integration also allows you to reblog noteworthy posts and create a stream for blogs you’re following.

App Directory
The HootSuite App Directory allows you to add even more social networks and tools into your dashboard. Example networks include Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, and many more. Learn more.

Message Scheduling
HootSuite allows you to schedule posts across social media accounts. This is extremely useful for posting at times when you can’t physically be on social media. However, scheduling posts is not a replacement for actually engaging — ensure you are still tracking responses to your posts and responding to messages.

The following video shows you how post scheduling works:

Hootsuite dashboard

Monitoring Conversations
HootSuite’s dashboard layout makes it easy to set up columns to monitor and listen to conversations on your social media channels. You can use HootSuite to monitor one or more of your Twitter accounts. You can perform and save searches, create and manage Twitter lists and followers right from the HootSuite dashboard. Other monitoring activities you can do in HootSuite include:

  • Create search streams
  • Search by @mentions
  • Search by hashtag
  • Create search streams based on keyword

The following video demonstrates how to use the search tool in HootSuite to quickly search and add saved searches to your dashboard.

Hootsuite dashboard

Mobile Apps
HootSuite has free mobile apps available for iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad), and Android. You can download the apps here.

HootSuite Teams
HootSuite Teams offers the ability to use HootSuite amongst several members of a team. You can easily scale HootSuite to extend management of social media platforms beyond one person, and you have the control to customize how your teams are structured and what roles each person will have.

You can provide different permissions to various team members depending on their role, and also assign messages to team members for follow up. HootSuite Teams makes managing social media within a department easy and effective. HootSuite Teams is available with the paid version of HootSuite.

This video explains more: