Evan Carmichael shows how he uses Hootsuite to manage Twitter without chaos: custom lists for different groups, alerts for specific names and companies, and a single dashboard to handle mentions, DMs, and replies. He schedules tweets for radio shows and live chats, and credits the system with bringing him business deals and speaking engagements.
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Hey, it's Evan, and today I want to share a tool with you called Hootsuite, and this is a tool I use every day to help me manage my Twitter account. Now you can use Hootsuite for Facebook and your Facebook pages and most of your social media stuff, but I only use it for Twitter. So here's how I use it. You can set up a whole bunch of different streams, and if you go to Twitter.com to manage your Twitter, you're going to be quickly bombarded with tons of tweets coming in, and it's just a mess. And most of the Twitter power users will use some kind of software to help them. So I store my sent tweets here so I can see what I've been writing and keep track of what's going on. Then for key contacts, what you can do is add them to a list. So I've created a list, you can see here it says list, and I've created one that's for family. And so here is my sister, she works at the UN and she moved from Liberia to New York now, and so she posts what's been going on. And so she's on my family list and it's a good way to to keep in touch. So anybody in my family who's on Twitter, I can add them to that list, and then all of their tweets will show up here, and I can scroll to check it out. You can also do searches, so that's the next one here. And here I'm searching for Toronto Salsa, which is a company I'm involved with, or Ron Knutski, who's a friend of mine. And anytime their name, either Ron Knutski or Toronto Salsa, show up in any tweet I'm notified. So you can use a search here, for example, for your company name, for your own personal name, for an industry term that you're tracking, and anytime anybody uses that word, it'll show up here so you can easily track and respond. So here, Scribble Live looks like they're doing some chat with Ron Knutski, my friend, and they've been posting a lot about it and showing his name, so that's why it's showing up. And it allows me to write back and say, hey, Scribble Live, exciting, Ron Knutski is the man. Give him a little bit of props, and just allows me to keep in touch. If Ron isn't mentioned anywhere, or if the salsa company is not mentioned anywhere, then I don't get notified. So it makes my life easier. What I love about this is I get it all in one place, and I'm not getting emails constantly throughout the day that I then have to get back to and look at and be distracted all day, because social media can easily take up a whole chunk of time if you let it distract you throughout the day. Next up is another list. So this one I call Baseball. I'm a baseball fan, and I have on my list Ken Rosenthal, Jon Heyman, who both cover Major League Baseball at a higher level, kind of overall what's happened in baseball, and then Shai Davidi, who covers the Blue Jays. I love the Blue Jays, so I like knowing what's been going on. So there's a lot of trade talk now, see what's happening, just kind of keeps me on top of that world. And again, any baseball writer that I want to follow, I can add to the list, and whenever they tweet, it's going to show up in my stream here. Next, I have my movement students. So Jen and Rich are both of my students, and when they tweet, I get an update again here. So they're added to another list. And these lists can be combined. You can call them whatever you want. You can have a list for your customers, a list for your prospects, a list for media, a list for important people, a list of people who you want to follow, whatever you want. So, you know, a new one just popped up here about, uh, danks. Is being traded from the White Sox to the Yankees. Wow, I hope not. I don't want the Yankees to get too strong. I'm a fan, but I like the Blue Jays more. So here I can see what my students are tweeting, and I can retweet too. So with each tweet, I can go in here and I can reply, or I can retweet, or I can send them a direct message, or there's more options as well that I can click to see. So, you know, I retweeted something that Jen wrote about Magic is believing in yourself, and then she retweeted it, and so I could see all of our activity together in that stream. Next, I have elite authors. So these are people who are authors on my website and are part of our elite program. So we have 8,000+ authors, but not all of them obviously elite. And so I like to see what they're up to, what they're posting, events they're going to. And again, I can easily from here click reply or retweet and get involved and respond to them. These are some clients again. So again, you can have all these different lists of things that you want to add to it here. The last ones that I wanted to share are these 3 here. So business, so these are, you know, clients that I've done business with. Again, it's another list. So Dell or TELUS. Direct messages, so these are people who write to you directly, um, as a private message instead of public. And again, I can see it here, I can reply to them. These are opportunities that are coming up for some Twitter chats they want to do, which is great. And then mentions. And so this is a big— this is the biggest one. These are people who are writing to you. And I saved this for last because it usually takes me the most work. And what I want to do is make sure that I'm responding to everybody, but again, I don't want email notifications coming out like crazy. So what I always do is You know, these are people who are using my handle. What I'll do is every day I'll retweet somebody's mention of me and leave a little message, and then I know where to start the next day. So for example, let me— so there's my face, let's go back. So this is what I did yesterday. So yesterday, these are all the ones that came in. So all these people are tweeting me, that's great, awesome, and I'll respond. They'll send a happy face, I'll send— I write back to almost everybody who writes to me, even if it's just a happy face. And then I'll take one of the tweets, this is from the quote, and I will retweet it and add a thank you or happy face or something. So this is from the day, so the quote, and if I go down here I'll probably see it here. So he quoted me, he got 20 retweets, so I just want to say thank you. I retweeted him so I see my message, and then I know the next day that I start from here. So I don't have to scroll down, I don't have to remember, did I write back to Allison Lee, did I write back to Bravo H05? Or not, I just go to my last tweet and then I see all of these are new. So these are all new that I'm going to go to tomorrow. I might take one of them, maybe, you know, I really like what James said, "The key is to believe." I'll retweet that and then I'll know where to start the next day. So just an easy way to make sure you're responding to everybody and doing it all at once every day. So that's how I use Hootsuite. There's some more advanced tools. Oh, one last thing that I wanted to mention is scheduling. You can schedule tweets out. So, you know, if you're not online at a certain time that you need a message to go out, you can schedule it. So you click in here, you write whatever your tweet is— this is my great tweet— and then you can schedule a time and say, okay, I want to go out on this day at whatever time. And I find this helpful if I'm, you know, doing a radio show and I want people to call in and I don't have time, you know, during my radio show to to do it because I'm talking, or if I'm in the middle of a Twitter chat and there are some messages that I want to get out that, you know, the famous quotes that I like, something that's inspiring. I'm usually so busy in the Twitter chat that I don't have time to actually, you know, write those messages out because I'm too busy responding to people. Or if you just want to schedule something in advance, you know, maybe you're going to do Twitter once a week and you want to set all your posts for the week. You can just go in and schedule it. One goes out every day to again save you time from having to log in. So that's how I use Hootsuite. It's really helping with my business. I've gotten a lot of deals and sales and speaking opportunities and contracts with big companies through my Twitter account, and all through using Hootsuite. If you guys like this video, let me know. Give me your thoughts, your questions, leave it in the comment section below if you want me to make any follow-ups to this. With your specific questions. Thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.
