By Trisha L. Salkas, Marketing Technologies One of the best ways to streamline the process of social media calendars is using Hootsuite, a social media management system that allows you to schedule posts days, weeks, and months in advance. Hootsuite is pretty straightforward, so if you’re feeling adventurous, here’s a great article on how to schedule social media posts. Here are a few things to know regarding using Hootsuite:
- Logging In: Hootsuite has some security setup such that if you’re on a new computer, Hootsuite will have you double verify you are supposed to have access. When you login, they want you to then send a confirmation code.
- If your email is associated with the account, then you should be able to locate the email and verify the confirmation code. However, if it’s not your email associated with the account, stay away from this. Often, it takes too long to receive the verification code (and the verification code has a time limit) and you’ll have to send another one.
- You can get around this by signing in with Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ (be careful you’re not logged into your personal accounts for any of these networks). Once you sign in with one of these social media networks, you will then be asked to provide the password for the login to Hootsuite. This takes less time and fewer people need to get involved.
- Connecting Social Media Networks: If you’re using an unpaid account, the maximum number of social media networks you can connect is three – we suggest going with the three most commonly used social sites: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. If you need to add another network, here’s a pretty helpful guide on how to do so.
- Reconnecting Social Media Networks: You will likely need to reconnect social networks, for instance, when a password is updated.
- LinkedIn accounts are only connected for 60 days at a time for security purposes. This is setup by LinkedIn, not Hootsuite. This means you’ll need to reconnect the LinkedIn accounts every 60 (or fewer) days. Here are some helpful instructions on how to do so.
- Scheduling Twitter Separately: Twitter has a limit on how many characters you can post (140). It is best practice to schedule Twitter posts separately from all other posts, as you will get an error message if your message is too long for Twitter. If you schedule Twitter posts at the same time as other social networks, you will not get the error message until after the post was supposed to be scheduled.
- Notifications from Hootsuite: Sometimes a scheduled post does not go through. When this happens, you’ll receive an email. Often, this is due to an expired password, changed password, or the network connection expired (see note above about reconnecting the network).
- You’ll likely only need to reschedule for the specific social media site that the post didn’t go through, not the other ones. You can see in Hootsuite which posts have been successful and which posts haven’t been by going to Publisher (the paper plane on the left) –> Past Scheduled. Anything in Green was successful. Anything in Red was not successful. You can click on them for more information.
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An expert in creating order out of chaos, Trisha L. Salkas is a Project Manager for PSM Marketing. She is friendly, energetic, detail-oriented, and uses these skills to build quality relationships with colleagues and clients. Trisha was the first lead coordinator for Shift MN, an anti-corporate tobacco campaign funded by the Minnesota Department of Health. With a team of 10 interns, an LGBTQ specific social media campaign was born with a focus on creating policies and awareness around corporate tobacco use. Trisha managed the $200,000 budget and developed evaluation measurements for the project.