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Hootsuite also allows you to do this sort of automated publishing thing, based on an
RSS feed. So if you have a blog, and you want it to feed into these social networking accounts
and post for you, you can add a feed, you just paste in the feed URL, and you can define
how often you want this to check for posts. You can have it check every twelve hours,
every hour, etc. When new posts are found, you can specify one to five posts to tweet
at a time. Include some of the post text... You can also add a prepend, for example (they
give you an example) "New Blog Post:" or "News Update:" and then you get to select which
profile, which social media account you want this to be posted on. So it's really flexible.
Let's go in and check out link statistics, and then we'll talk about automated posting
a little bit, and then we'll wrap things up.
If you click on the "Stats" button here, you'll see that it allows you to select certain profiles,
and it shows you how many clicks you've gotten throughout the given period. There's a twenty
four hours setting, thirty days, or you can even select the date range.
There's a link down here lower that shows referrals and regional statistics, and you
can load popular tweets from Twitter. When it pulls popular tweets, what it's going to
show you is what you're popular tweets have been, the most popular links that you've created.
So for example, the most popular one over the last seven days has been this article
on a Wordpress plugin, that I posted a blog post on. So it's really pretty useful, it
shows you some neat information and allows you to see where your traffic is heading,
how many clicks you've gotten, that sort of thing.
Now let's go back to the streams, that's how you get back to your posts, and your feeds,
and your friends and all that. We can see that we've got this test post here, scheduled
for eleven forty five today. A little bit about automated posting, there have been a
lot of blog articles written about using automation in social media. Some people seem to think
that it's the most evil thing in the world you can do, some people like to use it a lot.
I think that there's really a happy medium in there, there's a balance. If you spend
your entire day using social media, making posts, and reading what other people say,
it can be a huge time drain. But at the same time, you're supposed to be coming across
as a real person on social media, so you don't want to be too automated, you don't want to
be too robotic. You want to make sure and carry on good conversations,
but at the same time you might not want to spam people with ten links, you know, in a
minute. So try to find what's good for you and your company, your brand, your personality.
Hootsuite allows you to schedule some things for targeted times, like if you're targeting
a blog post for an Australian time zone, then go ahead and schedule one for what you think
might be a good time during the day that you think an Australian crowd might be on. Hootsuite
gives you the tool to schedule your posts, but you have to make the determination of
what's going to be good for you and your situation, OK?
Now real quickly let's talk about this Hootlet down here. You can see that it even shows
you: "drag me into your bookmark toolbar". So I'm going to drag this thing up here into
my toolbar and I'm just gonna let it say Hootlet. Now when it's there, one neat thing about
this Hootlet is that if I'm on a web page (and let's just pretend, I've got a web page
up here on CNET about the shuttle: "Shuttle Endeavour glides to ghostly night landing").
If I want to make a post about this, I'm just reading this page on CNET, and I want to post
on Twitter, Facebook, whatever, I can just click this Hootlet button and you can see
that I get the status update in a little popup window. I've got all the social media accounts
that I use, let's put in on Facebook. Let's schedule it for a few minutes in advance,
just so we can delete it in a minute. And we'll go ahead and click "Schedule" when everything
looks right. So then it's scheduled, and I can go back to reading the article or doing
whatever I was going to do. The post will happen for me automatically, we're going to
go back to Hootsuite in a second and delete it.
Now if I refresh my "Pending Tweets" column, we'll see that there it is. It's got the title
of the post, where it came from, and it's also got the owl.ly link, which is the link,
the shortener that Hootsuite uses on its own and will track for you, for your account.
So that's nice, it automatically does that for you if you use this Hootlet bookmark button.
Now let's hop over to our other browser, and sign in using our different account. So we
do that and we notice that... look at this, see? I don't have any of those columns that
we setup before, we don't have any authority to post to any social networks except for
the one that I was... you know, gave privilege to this account. So you can see that it's
really good and sort of restricted for multi-user situations. Like I said, you might have the
need to offer real-time customer service, so you know, give five people in your organization
editing accounts on here, and they can see what's being said about your brand, they can
respond to customer service issues, and that sort of thing. They can all be on the same
page. So that's really a good use of multiple users on Twitter.
So let's go back over to Safari, and we'll go ahead and delete these posts. I'll show
you how easy it is, it will just ask you if you want to permanently delete the message.
I'm going to say yes, delete those two, and they are all gone.
There is really so much more that Hootsuite does, but your brain is already overloaded,
so we'll stop here for now. Thank you for checking this out, I hope you give Hootsuite
a try, and maybe it will help you manage your social media time a little bit better. I really
hope this helps people out. See you next time!