For our assignment researching new social media tools, my team and I looked into Hootsuite, a social media management dashboard. I've been using the free version a bit and really enjoy it, but the program offers paid extensions of the browser-based program for use by businesses. That's where it shines.
In broad strokes, Hootsuite enables:
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Currently, Hootsuite is a go-to because of its broad support and platform compatibility. It works with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Wordpress and Mixi (a Japanese SNS), as well as others via third-party apps (such as YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, etc.).
It has its drawbacks, depending on what sort of business and budget you have, which you can read about at iag.me's famous blog about seven reasons you shouldn't use it. But for certain types of businesses, especially those with robust and conscientious social media strategies, Hootsuite seems more than apropos.
It has its drawbacks, depending on what sort of business and budget you have, which you can read about at iag.me's famous blog about seven reasons you shouldn't use it. But for certain types of businesses, especially those with robust and conscientious social media strategies, Hootsuite seems more than apropos.
A Case Study: Ticketleap
Though Hootsuite is definitely used by a large segment of big business thanks to greater budgets (see pingdom's article on what some of these are here), I found Hootsuite's case study of Ticketleap interesting because it was a small tech startup. Find and download the case study here.
Ticketleap is an event marketing and online ticketing platform that seems to really understand the importance of social media in event promotion, planning and engagement. One of the challenges is summed up by Sarah Lang, the company's marketing manager:
Though Hootsuite is definitely used by a large segment of big business thanks to greater budgets (see pingdom's article on what some of these are here), I found Hootsuite's case study of Ticketleap interesting because it was a small tech startup. Find and download the case study here.
Ticketleap is an event marketing and online ticketing platform that seems to really understand the importance of social media in event promotion, planning and engagement. One of the challenges is summed up by Sarah Lang, the company's marketing manager:
"Some of the more popular events [held by our clients] will tweet once and draw 10,000 associated social messages. That’s a huge volume of content to sift through, and because such a large part of our social strategy is consuming and sharing user-generated content, our strategy would not be effective without Hootsuite."
To handle such demands, Ticketleap took advantage of Hootsuite's support for teams and assignments to distribute the load between customer service, promotion and engagement tasks. Hootsuite also enabled them to create custom streams that searched for specific Twitter hashtags and keywords so that they didn't have to comb through random content to find relevant posts with which to engage. For sharing UGC, the scheduling capacities of Hootsuite allowed for constant sharing without overwhelming followers.
Verdict
Some of Hootsuite's biggest hurdles involve $$, but it seems that with appropriate planning and preparedness, even smaller teams have the ability (depending on the brand and its own goals and capabilities) to provide a good ROI. This seems especially true for companies like Ticketleap, the nature of whose work pretty much revolves around social media.
Some of Hootsuite's biggest hurdles involve $$, but it seems that with appropriate planning and preparedness, even smaller teams have the ability (depending on the brand and its own goals and capabilities) to provide a good ROI. This seems especially true for companies like Ticketleap, the nature of whose work pretty much revolves around social media.