October 1, 2010 in Blog, Social Media, Tools & Techniques by David Dungan

Hootsuite = Social Media without the headache

One of the main reasons that business owners are skeptical about using social media is the amount of time it can take. This is definitely
true and is why larger companies often have dedicated community managers to take care of this.

Not many companies can afford this luxury however. So how do you manage your social media communities without spending an excessive amount of time on it? Well the first step is managing your various accounts from one spot.

Hootsuite is a self-described social media dashboard. It allows users to do the following:

• view their various accounts from one place
• post to multiple accounts at once
• create groups to manage and prioritize who they can see
• schedule tweets and posts to appear throughout the day
• syndicate RSS and atom feeds to appear in tweets and posts
• shorten URLs to appear in tweets and posts
• view statistics on their accounts

By using Hootsuite you can tell your audience about news, events, special offers, give advice, respond to queries and monitor conversations regarding your brand in less than half the time it normally would take. By opening Hootsuite in the morning at the same time you check your mail, I reckon most won’t have to spend longer than 20mins doing all of this.

Best of all there’s a free version. Check it out.

www.hootsuite.com