"Is Hootsuite Worth It? Comparing Manual Posting vs. Hootsuite for Social Media"

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of #AskEvan. Today I'm going to answer a question from Oren, who is one of our commenters on the TELUS Talks Business blog. So in September I wrote a post about Twitter and how I get the most from it by using a tool called Hootsuite, and this was the post that we created. And so I just created a video and a little bit of information on how I use it and get value from it on my desktop and especially on my iPad. So you can check that out if you want. But down here in the comments, we had a comment here by Oren who wrote, "Great post. You, Tellyz, should think of posting a similar post about enterprise and business use of Hootsuite, teams, assignments, permissions, etc." So it's a great question. The point of that video and the post was on a small-time entrepreneur, so individual or if you have a small team and you're running things yourself, then that's basically how I use it. So for social media, I run my own social media, and when I'm doing Twitter, I post all my own stuff myself. So I was using it from my own perspective of how a single entrepreneur could do it. But if you are outsourcing it, if you have someone on your team doing it, or if you're using another service to help do it, there are a lot of other tools in Hootsuite that you can use to be able to delegate that stuff so you're not doing it yourself. One thing that you want to watch out— so I'm going to load my Hootsuite here so I can show you. It's really important on social media that you have an authentic voice, and that if you're not going to do it yourself, that whoever is doing it can really represent you very well. So I manage my own Twitter account, and we have over 100,000 followers, and the people who respond to me and I write back to them, it's actually me. So there's a few here that I was writing. That's actually me writing, so it does take some time every day to do it, but I think it's an important way to connect with your audience. And you want to make sure that the person who is doing it, if it's not going to be you, really does represent you and your brand very well. So just a caveat before you get started here. So there are a couple of options. This is the Hootsuite program that I've loaded up here. If you click on your face, so this is my face, but it will be your face, you can see there's a number of different options. So all I use Hootsuite for at the moment is Twitter. You can use it for a lot of different networks. So you can click Add Social Network here, and you can see a whole bunch of them. So if you have a Facebook account, Google+, LinkedIn, whatever it is that you want people to manage for you, you could add here. One thing I'm waiting for is the Google+ personal account. So if you have a Google+ page, you can put it on here and have that managed for you, but I can't see an option yet to be able to manage your personal Google+ profile. So hint hint, Hootsuite, love to see that if you guys are watching this video. The page I don't find as helpful. So we'll close that down. So you do have a lot of options to add different networks in if you want to go beyond just Twitter. And then here you can see that you can create an organization. So if you want to have people manage it for you, if you want to invite people to your team and then assign tasks to them, talk about, you know, collaborating on different projects and also say, you know, here's who's going to be doing what programming for us and what messaging. Then you can click here, start collaborating with others, and then you can add some people to your team. So if you have a virtual assistant that you're using or an outsourced service that you're using, or someone even, you know, who works in your office and is part of your team, you can do that here by clicking on this button and getting them involved. The homepage, this is, this is what we talked about in the actual video itself, and so it shows all the different lists and things that are being updated on a regular basis. You can click on Publisher, and this isn't something that I do, but you can do it as well. It's another great feature within Hootsuite. It's basically allowing you to schedule out tweets. So if you want to schedule things out in advance and say, okay, on this day I want this tweet to come out, so you're not having to be in front of the computer, then you could do it through Hootsuite. I use a different program to help me with that, but you could do it through Hootsuite if you wanted to. And if you're doing it so that there's approval required, so if this is your team member who's logged in and then they need to, you know, get their tweet approved by you before it goes live. You can have it to be, you know, required approval before it does go live. And if you want, you can have it come from an RSS feed. So an example here would be if you have a blog and you want every blog post that you have to automatically go hit your Twitter stream, then you can add it here as an RSS feed and it will automatically pump your Twitter— pump your blog post out to your Twitter account too. So I don't— again, I use something else to do that, but it's awesome to be able to do that within Hootsuite. If you want to as well. So it's great for scheduling. Analytics too, there's different analytics you can, you know, different reports you can create. And some of these are going to be, you know, the more analytics that you need, the more, you know, there might be some cost involved with it too. But there's analytics that can be involved. And then assignments, again, this is you can create assignments for people who are on your team and say, you know, I need these amounts of tweets to go out. And you can collaborate together and either give them their own assignments, or if you're the one doing it on behalf of somebody else, you can see the assignments that have been put out here for you. So it is a great way to be able to do things beyond yourself if you're not gonna be managing it yourself. I find Hootsuite is a really valuable and important tool to be able to, for me, manage such a huge Twitter account and do it personally myself and keep on top of everything that's happening. Because if you just go to Twitter.com, you're gonna get bombarded. But if you want to also be able to delegate things out and you don't want to spend the time to learn it yourself or be too active yourself, then there's other great tools within Hootsuite to be able to do it. If we click on Settings and if we go to our account, you can see the difference between a paid account and a free account. So if we go click on Hootsuite Pro, this is a quick— this is just a Hootsuite website and you can see the difference here between the paid accounts and the pro account. So The free one here, that's what I'm currently using, so you can have up to 5 accounts. I only use one. You get basic reporting, you can do up to 2 RSS feeds, but you can't do a lot of the collaboration stuff that we were talking about. But it is free, so, you know, there's a cost-benefit there, right? You can only do so much, it's limited, but it is free. If you wanted to pay for the premium account or the pro account, you get more profiles, more analytics, more RSS feeds, more users. Here it's only 2. I think you can pay for more users if you need more people involved than 2. Again, reports, lots of other features to it, and that's $10 a month. So if you're going to be using it heavily and you need people on your team to do it for you, you know, if you're hiring somebody to do it for you, $10 a month is nothing to add on top of that cost. So something to think about. I think there's an option to add more users. Yeah, here. So if you need more users than 2, you can add another $10 a month per. So something to think about. I don't work for Hootsuite, so I don't have a vested interest in, in this, but I do really like it as a cool tool to use to manage your Twitter account. And again, it's what I use on a daily basis to help me get the most out of Twitter and also not make sure that I'm spending my time effectively and not wasting it trying to read through everything that comes in. So thanks for the tip, Oren. Hopefully for everybody watching, that provided a little bit more context on how you can expand it for more of an enterprise use, or at least as an entrepreneur building it beyond yourself and having a team get involved. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more of these for you. And if you have a question about Hootsuite or Twitter, or another question about your business, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those and I try to get back to everybody as quickly as I can. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]