Here we’re going to look at how to manage your social media in as little as 10 minutes a day using a tool called Hootsuite.

TRANSCRIPT

Now, the reason why I’m doing this is because far too many people who run small businesses and who are self-employed spend far too much time, often wasted time, mucking about on social media pretending that they’re actually doing some kind of marketing.  And the difficulty is is that things like Facebook and Twitter and even LinkedIn can literally become a time vampire where it just sucks all the time away because you think that being active on all of this stuff is the way to promote your business.

Now, I’m not here to get into the argument about how much time you should be spending on social media, but I know that a lot of people spend way too much time, far more than is necessary, doing things that are plainly unnecessary on social media.  But, I want to address that because, ultimately, the only finite resource we have is time, so you need to learn how to use it wisely. And social media is one of those things that a lot of people could do with help getting to grips with.

Check out Hootsuite

So, I’m going to show you a screen recording of me talking through how I use Hootsuite, and how you get to grips with it as well.  With Hootsuite you can quickly get to grips with How To Manage Your Social Media with less effort than you might think.

How To Manage Your Social Media in just 10 Minutes a Day – it’s simpler than you might think

Okay, so here we have the opening screen for your Hootsuite account, and I just want to very briefly talk you through what we’re seeing here before getting into the nuts and bolts.

Effectively, Hootsuite is a social media management tool. It enables you to connect varying social media up to this and manage them all from the same place.

Now, one of the reasons I like it is because I found that going into each of these social medias in turn, to keep it all updated was, quite frankly, hard work and time-consuming, so I looked for a tool, and Hootsuite was recommended to me. And, to be honest, I’ve been using it for the last few years. and I highly recommend it. And if you want to find it, there will be a link below the video.

I have the Pro account which enables me to manage loads of different social media. With a free account, you get up to three. For some, that’s fine. For others, that won’t be enough, but it’s not a great deal of money, just the price of a few cups of coffee a month.  And I see this as a great investment, purely on the time saved as much as anything else.

Anyway, so let’s take a look through what we have in front of us.  So, these are all the different accounts that I have hooked up to my Hootsuite.  In fact, this is my personal Twitter, personal Facebook, LinkedIn, my business Twitter, business Facebook, business Google Plus, and my YouTube account.

And I’m also following a few accounts on Twitter over here that I interact with on a regular basis.  I’m not going to go through the setup, how to set it up, right now.  There’s plenty of different videos on how to do that out there.  Let’s just say you choose the social media that you want to connect it with. I have got five social media here.  There’s LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, and YouTube, and those are the key things for me and our business.  Of course, there are loads of others and you can probably connect those up as well.

So, what do we mean by How To Manage Your Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day?

Well, the key is this.  Right in front of you, you see all of the activities that I’ve chosen to view in my home screen for my business Twitter account.  So here’s the feeds of all the people I follow on Twitter.  Here’s those who’ve mentioned me by putting our Twitter handle, @buzzwebsites, into their Twitter posts.  Here’s our tweets, or my tweets.  These are retweets, of course, if I’ve been retweeted by other people.  And these are messages, private messages, through Twitter on this particular account.

So, to have a quick look at the LinkedIn over here, I have my home feed.  Again, this is all the people I’m connected to, and these are my updates only.  Again, on our Facebook feed, just our timeline and people who sent us messages.  Google Plus, our home feed and the feed of those people we’re following.  And YouTube.  YouTube’s quite basic on here, but, then again, there’s not a huge amount you can do on YouTube as a social media as much, but I keep tabs on when people comment on our YouTube videos.  I always moderate them, I don’t just let them go straight in without me knowing what they’re saying, etc., and allowing them to take part.

So, that’s that.  Effectively, if we’re looking at LinkedIn, if we got a note to say somebody’s responded to something we posted, we can go in here and we can respond and reply in here.  It works very, very well.  Same thing with Twitter.  You don’t actually have to log in to each one of these social media independently.  You can just do it all from here depending on how you’ve set it up.

Now, just going to really quickly talk through posting out a message onto your social media using Hootsuite.   So, first things first, we choose the different social media that we want to connect up, that we want to post to.  At the moment, I don’t want to post it to my personal Twitter or my personal Facebook.  I want it to go out to my LinkedIn, Twitter, business Facebook, and Google Plus, all to do with the business.  So, I’m going to type something up right now.  It’s something very, very short. I’m going to just hashtag it with #marketingideas.

And here’s where it gets interesting because there is a function where you can also schedule where the Hootsuite will pick all the times when it’s most likely to be seen by the most people according to your social media and according to your social media activity. So you can turn on AutoSchedule.  You could also schedule your messages to go at any point in the future, so you could spread them out, post them one by one, spread them out so they don’t go out at different times to different social media, etc.

So you could, in theory, just type a different message for different social media, schedule them to go out at different times.  You set the date, the time here, am, pm, etc., and then you would schedule it.  AutoSchedule is currently off, so I’m just literally going to schedule this. In fact, I’m just going to press Schedule right now, and then that should go out. Actually, let’s forget about scheduling. Didn’t want to work. Let’s turn it off, and then click on Send Now.

Well, that’s been posted. I’m just going to refresh this feed over here, and there we are.  And that’s gone out to my Twitter. It’s gone out to my LinkedIn.  It’s being a bit sluggish at the minute.  We’ll just update that. It should pop up.  Nope, doesn’t want to play ball, it seems to be a bit slow today, but it will turn up there.

And that just enables me, and then if somebody writes a comment in here, then I can respond to that all from one place without having to go into all four of them and do them one by one.

I think this is a fantastic time-saver. It certainly enables us to get some social media out every single day. I’ve scheduled stuff out regularly. I usually use the AutoSchedule function because it just saves me time and having to worry about when it’s going out. Just let the software do the work. That’s what it’s good at, and it does work incredibly well.

If you’ve any questions, or would like some help on How To Manage Your Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day, please let us know (write a comment below or drop us a line) and we’ll get back to you asap.

Summary

Article Name

How To Manage Your Social Media in 10 Minutes a Day

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If you have more than one social media channel then it's likely that you're spending too much time on them Here you'll watch us using Hootsuite to save time and make social media management a whole lot easier.

Author

Karl Craig-West

Publisher Name

Buzz Website Design in Leicestershire

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