hootsuite

Today’s world heavily relies on social media, and websites like Facebook and Twitter have become an integral part of most people’s daily lives. As these outlets continue to change the way that people interact with one another, it also changes the future of public relations. Since the main goal of any PR practitioner is to obtain free publicity for their client, social media outlets can be one of their most useful tools. Many companies get free publicity just from the fact that happy customers are writing statuses, “tweeting” and blogging about how happy they are with a product. At the same time, negative feedback must also be monitored and responded to in a timely manner.

With that being said, all of these social media channels can sometimes become overwhelming. Unless updating statuses, tweets and posts is your main job, it is almost impossible for anyone managing multiple accounts to keep up. Luckily, the website hootsuite has come to the rescue. The self-proclaimed “leading social media dashboard” gives frequent social media users a variety of tools that makes life on the web a lot easier.

First, hootsuite lets you to add a number of your social media profiles to the site. For example, users can add their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blog, but those are just a few of the options. The site is a huge time saver in that you can monitor and post to all of your favorite websites from one place. Hootsuite makes it easy to navigate between different networks by structuring users’ home pages in tab format.

Different streams within the tab make it easy to see who’s saying what.

Many social media companies will find hoosuite to be a huge advantage because of the custom analytics tool. It allows you to track company and product mentions and follower growth. In addition multiple users can be added to one account. So, if your company monitors the Twitter page of a local fast food chain, for example, more than one person from within the team can contribute to updates and customer replies.

One of my favorite tools to utilize on hootsuite is the scheduler. Let’s say that you know you have a jam packed day tomorrow, but still want to keep up with your updates. You can schedule up to 50 updates to happen throughout various times of the day. Even better, if you want the update to appear only on Twitter it takes only one click.

I’m pretty new to hootsuite, but so far I’m obsessed! It will definitely be one of the tools I use most as a public relations practitioner. In the past I have used Twaitter, but once I was introduced to hootsuite I considered it to reign supreme. There are a number of different sites that allow you utilize many of the tools I’ve talked about. Six Revisions has posted a useful article that compares the pros and cons of different sites here so that you can decide which one is best for you!

Do any of you currently use hootsuite? If not, which social media dashboard is your favorite?