Entri AdminEntrihub chats to Lesley Mallon, Founder of Think Social Media. Lesley discusses tools that will help manage your social media account.
Question 1: What tools are available to manage your social media account?
Lesley: There are so many platforms to help run them it's actually getting a little bit crazy. I like HootSuite. I think it's a great platform. You can connect to Twitter, you can get connect LinkedIn and to Instagram. I think from a Facebook point of view, Facebook scheduling is top-notch. It really is.
Question 2: What is Facebook scheduling?
Lesley: Facebook's scheduling is when you write a content schedule for your business page. You can actually go and schedule, spend half a day, you've written all your content and you can go scheduled them and say I want this post to go off it Tuesday at six o'clock in the morning. You put the picture with there and you say schedule and you schedule it so you can do that for an entire month. You can sit down for a day and figure out exactly what your marketing plan is going to be for the month. You can write all your content, you can go find all your pictures and then you can schedule every single one of those and then you don't have to worry about it. Doing it through Facebook is amazing. The Facebook scheduling option is actually really really top-notch.
Question 3: What is Hootsuite?
Lesley: I think the free version has, I think it's three platforms that you can connect to so for a start a business it's fantastic. Then you've got a paid option if you've got more than that amount of platforms. What you can do there again is you can schedule all your tweets. I do that with my social media tweeting. I don't do live tweeting unless I'm somewhere. A tweet goes off at 6 o'clock in the morning and 10 o'clock at night. I don't even touch my phone because it's all scheduled for HootSuite. The same thing goes with Instagram, very very great fantastic with Instagram. What they actually do is Instagram does involve a little bit more of a manual process because it will send you a notification saying publish this to Instagram. You actually have to open it up, put the filter on that you want to. You've already put all the text there, so it's just a matter of pasting the text on your Instagram and publishing it. Instagram is a little bit more manual but again if you've written a social media content schedule for the month it's very easy to just do all of this and then you don't really have to worry about your social media. Except for checking, making sure that anybody commenting, you know you like the comments back. If anybody sends you a message, you know you respond to the message. It takes away a lot of the headache of people having to worry about, gosh what am I going to post today or haven't posted for like three or four days. If you do a content schedule it's fantastic for managing your social media platforms.