I have been learning social media over the last several years, but have not been conscious if I was just being busy or was making real progress in building a base of influence or not.  With the upcoming launch of my second and third books, I decided I needed to improve my social media effectiveness.  While it is required to have a social media platform, there is a direct trade-off in the amount of time I could put into social media versus the time I put into writing and creating content.

Several people mentioned Hootsuite, but I previously never found the time to review its functionality.  I felt I was able to do what I needed to manually.  But I had grown to two Facebook profiles, two Facebook fan pages, two websites and blogs, and a LinkedIn profile.  In total I had almost 5,000 followers with some overlap between the various social media channels.  I also realized that my following in terms of page views and comments was directly related to how often I posted, which was becoming less frequent with the immense concentration I was putting into book writing.  I needed help and needed it quickly.  I reviewed Hootsuite and a few other social media monitoring and management platforms.  Hootsuite seemed to be the clear winner and provided the best value for money.  Additionally, I was very impressed when I mentioned Hootsuite in a tweet and Hootsuite AUS tweeted me directly asking if they could help.  I thought “Wow, I wish I could do that!”

So I took advantage of Hootsuites 30-day trial of their Pro package and have never looked back.  At first, it appeared a bit intimidating and I was not sure what to do, so I let a day go by.  But then I just got into it and Hootsuite was very intuitive.  Within two hours, I had established three streams across my nine social media channels and started to publish tweets and posts from a single dashboard.  But the benefits went far beyond that.  They included:

• Saving 20 – 30 minutes daily by not having to pop in and out of various Twitter and Facebook accounts
• Schedule more opportune times to release tweets and posts when more people would be aware of them – I was not locked into a schedule constrained by a full-time job and not being able to tweet or post to the US and European market at the right time.  This was now all set up and scheduled in advance.  I also downloaded Hootsuite to my iPad which I always carry with me and was able to use 24/7 instead of waiting until I was at my laptop again
• I used the Hootsuite dashboard for each of my three streams to monitor and thank people who mentioned or retweeted my posts so I could more effectively engage with and build my audience stickiness
• Using Hootsuite disciplined me into creating a weekly posting schedule for each blog and proactively write and post in advance.  I have built up a reserve of posts which I never had before and a plan for each week in 2014 where my posts reinforce each other and my overall brand.  I also created a #qotd (quote of the day) and schedule these a week in advance now – this has brought me a number of new Twitter followers
• I much more clearly understand how influential I am (not very and glad that Hootsuite alerted me to that!) by using their reports and monitoring my dashboard.  They alerted me to my Klout score which I had never seen before and got me going on how to improve it

I am now much more disciplined, proactive, consistent and effective with my social media strategy, and spending less time on it than ever before.  And I have not added my other team member, created lists or used a number of the other sophisticated features that are included with Hootsuite.

I am sold on Hootsuite Pro and it has provided an immediate return on investment and improvement in both productivity and effectiveness.  I am monitoring my Klout scores to have hard evidence that my strategies are working and have proof of how Hootsuite has helped in tangible ways.  This will be shared in a future post.  Stay tuned!

© 2013. Steve Shipley, author of Wine Sense, due out early 2014
Twitter: @inkitpub
Twitter: @shipleyaust
Still Stupid at Sixty (published under my writing pseudonym Blake Stevens)