How to Use Hootsuite in 13 Minutes - YouTube

hi everyone my name's maddie and i work in  the online education team here at hootsuite  

and today we're going to cover how to get started  with hootsuite and by the end of this video  

my goal is to have your hootsuite account looking  like mine so set up with different streams having  

all your social accounts connected whether  that's facebook twitter linkedin instagram  

and also creating some content and getting  it scheduled and into your calendar queue  

so this is just a little sneak peek of what it's  going to look like in the end but let's go back  

to the very beginning and i'll show you how i  set all this up so now that we've signed up for  

our hootsuite account and we're in the dashboard  we're ready to start monitoring and setting up  

some boards and streams because it's my first time  in the dashboard i've got this get started button  

and it's going to lead me through some basic  setup of streams so i'm going to hit get started  

and it's prompting me to select a social  network to connect so because we haven't  

actually connected a social network yet they're  all grayed out so i'm going to hit add social  

network and because twitter's first i'll connect  with my twitter so here i'm just going to follow  

the prompts to authorize hootsuite to access my  account so i'm going to log in and now we can  

see that twitter has a checkmark beside it and  it's no longer grayed out we've connected that  

to our hootsuite account so i'm going to hit  next and i'm going to add it to my dashboard  

so you can see it's auto auto-populated a  couple streams for me just to get me started  

so when you're in hootsuite you have the  flexibility to set up your boards and streams  

however you like but i like to organize everything  by social channel so i'm gonna start this first  

board as a board for twitter so i'm gonna go over  here and i'm gonna rename it twitter and so it's  

already set me up with a couple streams so i've  got the my tweets stream which is showing me all  

of my tweets coming out of twitter i've also got  this mention stream this stream is letting me see  

every time someone has mentioned me and is having  a conversation so i can immediately respond there  

i'd also suggest adding a home stream so the  home stream is letting me see things on my  

twitter home page of my news feed so i can see  anything that i may want to interact with and  

i'd also suggest adding a search stream what  this will let me do is it allows me to monitor  

key hashtags or topics that i may want to be  paying attention to so if i wanted to see what  

people are talking about for example hotels  i'll just put that in there and search for it  

and that's going to show me every time that  hashtag hotels has been mentioned across twitter  

so i've got my twitter board pretty well set up  here i also want to create one for facebook but  

before i can pull any of my facebook information  in i need to connect my page so anytime you want  

to connect a social network in hootsuite it's  really simple you just go down to the my profile  

button at the bottom left of the navigation and  then you'll see this social networks and teams  

button so if we click on that it takes me to all  my social networks and teams so you can see that  

i've got my twitter account connected here so i  want to add another one so i'll click on private  

network and i'll select facebook and i'll follow  the prompts the same way that i did with twitter

and i'll select the page that i want to connect  and hit done great so now you can see that my  

facebook page is connected down here along with my  twitter page so to get back to our main dashboard  

we'll simply click on the streams button up  here and now we want to create that facebook  

board similar to the twitter board that we  created so i'm going to select new board

and that gives me the option to rename it i'm  going to rename it first because sometimes i  

forget there we go facebook and i'm going to go  to the get started button on browse all streams  

i'm going to change the network here to facebook  and that's going to give me a few different  

monitoring options here as you can see so for  facebook i'm going to add my timeline that's just  

going to show me everything that's on my facebook  timeline i'm also going to add my posts so i can  

see all my live posts and i'll add an app mention  stream which is the same as twitter it shows me  

any time i've been mentioned across facebook  another interesting one is the scheduled posts  

so right now i don't have anything scheduled  but if i did all my scheduled posts would appear  

here and it would give me an idea of some  of the scheduled content that's going out  

so now that we've got our facebook and twitter  streams set up and they're looking really good  

we can start to cover how to create a message so  the first thing to double check before we start  

creating messages in hootsuite is making sure that  our account and settings are set up right so in  

order to access our account settings we go to this  my profile button in the bottom left navigation  

and then you can select account settings at  the top so there's a few things we can do  

here is where you can add an image that your  profile has a photo as well as you're able to  

check your time zone here so make sure this is  the right time zone for where you're working so  

that when we do schedule posts in a second  they're gonna go out in the right time zone  

um i'm in vancouver so that's looking good  for me the last thing you can look at is under  

preferences you have the option to change the  language you can change this to french german  

italian whatever you like i'm gonna work  in english today so i think we're good here  

and then you just hit save preferences at the  end to save any changes that you made all right  

so now we've got all our searching and monitoring  set up we've got our account settings good to go  

so let's create a post and schedule some content  for the upcoming week so to get started you click  

the composer button so the composer button can  be accessed here from anywhere in the dashboard  

and the composer will immediately pop up and you  can choose which networks you want to schedule  

to so i'm going to schedule to facebook and  twitter simultaneously for this post and once  

i have the channel selected i can add in my text  and any links that i want to direct my audience to  

so right away you'll see that because i've  added in a link i get this immediate preview  

of how it would look but if you don't like this  photo or you want to swap it for your own photo  

or a photo from our free library of photos you're  totally able to do that so if you want to upload  

your own you would just go here drag and drop  your file or click to upload from your computer  

or you have the option you can go to open  media library and here you have access to  

our stock image library so because i'm doing  a post about travel i'm going to search travel  

within this library i'm going to find a photo that  i like i like this one so i'm going to select it

and if i close this now i can see that that photo  has replaced the photo that was there before  

i can also preview what this post is going to  look like on each network before it goes out so  

i can see the cropping and how it differs from  platform to platform so one thing that i have  

noticed as i'm looking at this post is that my  link looks pretty long and clunky hootsuite does  

have an automatic link shortener built in so  all you have to do is select shorten with ally

and once we select that we see that the link  is automatically condensed over in the preview  

section it looks way cleaner to my audience  and it also uses less characters which can  

be really helpful if you're sharing to twitter  um and just a note here that the updated link  

is going to appear in the preview but your  original text spot your text box is going to  

have the the original link in it so right now  i'm pretty happy with how this post is looking  

and i'm ready to schedule it out so to schedule  i just go down to the schedule for later button  

and once i select that i have the option to  pick a day and time that i want it to go out so  

let's say i want it to go out next wednesday at 2  p.m and i'll click done so i'll click the schedule  

button and it'll schedule both of these posts for  that time so now i've scheduled that post we can  

actually see it in this scheduled stream from our  facebook board we set up earlier before it had  

nothing in it but now we've scheduled something  so we can see it here which is pretty exciting  

all right so now we're going to head over to the  publisher and view all of the content that we've  

just scheduled so once we get to the publisher  and the planner we can see this calendar and if we  

go to where we've scheduled our content for next  week we can see that our twitter and our facebook  

posts are both there scheduled on the 9th when  we scheduled them for which is really exciting  

and you can also see there's a couple other pieces  of content that i've previously scheduled so now  

that if you ever want to preview a post you can  just click on it and it's going to bring up some  

details over here it'll tell you the network it's  going to the schedule time any alt text that's  

with it and if you want to make any edits you can  click this pencil up at the top and that will open  

up the compose box and you can make any edits  as needed on the original post also if you click  

here on these more options you can delete the post  duplicate the post or move the post to your drafts  

also know that you can just grab any of these  posts and move them to a different date and  

time to reschedule them the planner is really  interactive it's super easy to make changes if  

you need to great so now that you've got all your  content scheduled for the week and you've seen it  

all on your planner now i'm going to go over  some tips and tricks that can really help with  

the engagement side and the back and forth with  people that may be mentioning you in your audience  

and also how you can cater some of those searches  that we set up earlier to be a little bit more  

specific for what you're looking for so when it  comes to engagement let's say we have an example  

like this post over here where we've got someone  who's asking us a question or they've been trying  

to reach us on twitter know that you can respond  right here so you have the option to reply  

you can retweet with some other options down  here and you also have the option to like this  

you're probably not going to like it in this  instance because it's not a very happy customer  

but it isn't a good opportunity to reach out to  them and reply so when it comes to that initial  

hotel search that we made earlier there's a  few ways that we can narrow this down to get a  

little more of a specific search so if we click  on this little gray magnifying glass at the top  

it's going to give me a few options so if i choose  to filter by followers i can drag this bar and i  

can filter by follower size basically this will  only show me posts of people or brands that have  

a following of let's say 2 500 plus people also if  i wanted to filter by any additional search words  

i can do that as well so if i just switch this  drop down to search and i can search for let's say  

canada and i would just see posts that  contain hotel and also mentions canada so  

for facebook really all the same rules apply  if i want to respond to any of the posts that  

have been made on my timeline i can respond  right underneath just like i would natively

we have a pool very exciting also if i had  comments coming in i could respond there too  

or anywhere that i've been mentioned so at this  point you've basically got your hootsuite account  

set up you've scheduled your first pieces of  content you've got some great search streams set  

up so you can see what's happening on twitter  and facebook and i'd just like to add that  

everything we did today was for facebook and  twitter but you can also set this up for other  

social networks such as linkedin youtube or  instagram um we didn't do that today just so  

we could focus on two things but i invite you to  go explore those options on your own following the  

same setup as we did for facebook and twitter here  so this should make your day-to-day a lot easier  

and allow you to be a lot more proactive um the  last thing that i always recommend taking a look  

at is the app directory so we can find that by  going to the my profile button at the bottom here  

and then selecting app directory so hootsuite  has a ton of different apps to choose from and a  

ton of them are free which is really cool so you  can just browse free apps here by clicking free  

or you can search for a specific integration  so for example i use google drive a lot  

and i can see that we've got cloud view  for hootsuite which is google drive so  

i can install that here for free so overall  that's the way i like to set up my accounts  

i hope you found it useful it's a really great  way to start and should provide a really good  

starting point to start keeping track of  what's going on in your social calendar  

and it's always helpful to remember that if  you have any questions you can reach out to  

our help center customer support or view any  of our hootsuite academy content over here

so in our next video we're going to dive into some  hootsuite professional features so a little deeper  

on social networks bulk scheduling and editing  photos using hootsuite analytics i'll put that  

video in the bottom here when it's ready and you  can go check that out later if you'd like thanks everyone!