If I were going to name any hurdle that a business owner faces when it comes to building an effective social media presence it would have to be time. There are plenty of other pressing problems that come up during a day, including the need to serve your customers.
That’s why I absolutely love HootSuite, and I think you’ll love it too. This is probably the easiest tool out there for scheduling your tweets, a strategy I outlined in the Twitter 101 post.
You can also monitor your tweets, direct messages, Twitter stream and mentions from a single, unified screen, and do so on multiple accounts. You don’t even have to download any special software since it’s all done out of your browser.
You start by creating an account. Then you can add each of your twitter accounts. They’ll all be shown on a separate tab.
But the real magic is in the Publisher sidebar. That’s where you’ll schedule each of your tweets.
From this screen you simply compose your message in the field at the very top of the page. You’ll choose your account and then click on the calendar button.
Then it’s a simple matter of putting a tweet out for the right date and time. You can sit down and load up 30 days of links and content in just a couple of hours this way if you have content to share.
I also recommend scheduling one tweet for the morning and one tweet for the night this way (different tweets). This allows you to catch different crowds during the day.
While you’re logged on you can quickly offer some @replies and re-tweets if you see anything interesting in your Twitter stream. You can also use a quick share button if you come across any interesting articles during down time just as you normally would.
If you want to follow new people you’ll need to go down to the “Contacts” tab. It will let you choose between the people you are following and the people who are following you.
These features are all available on the free account. If you want to update your account you could gain access to some other features, like analytics, which can offer some insights into how effective your campaign actually is.
This is truly a “fix it and forget it” solution. As you create more content you can continue to load up your tweets well in advance of when they’ll debut, ensuring that you won’t fade into obscurity even in your busiest seasons of the year!
Today’s Action Items:
- Get a HootSuite account and try scheduling at least one week of tweets.
