According to Hootsuite, the average social media marketing budget settles between $200 to $350 per day. So, how big is your social media budget? For example, if you have $100 to spend on social media marketing, how do you send it? Well, there is one way to spend it as explained by Alfred Lua in this article.
Every online business — small, medium, or large — should have a good social media marketing strategy in place. And now, apart from using a platform like Hootsuite, every strategy put in place should be backed by a fruitful social media campaign budget plan. On a clear note, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all social media campaign budget.
Simply, because every company has different resources and different priorities. So, whether you’re working with a shoestring or cushy budget, there are a few key components you should figure into your calculations first. You can learn more in this article. It’s also important to realize, social media branding can be used for a variety of purposes.
Whether it’s social selling, content marketing, or customer support. This provides a perfect opportunity to reach the target audience and build a brand. However, with so many different platforms available and heavy competition, it can be tricky to set your brand apart. And even fail to link it to Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. that’s where Hootsuite comes in.
What Is Hootsuite?
When it comes to social media marketing and management, there’s so much to do. Like scheduling posts, dealing with customer queries, crisis monitoring, finding prospects, reporting on various metrics, and more. And as such, social media managers don’t have it easy.
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that covers almost every key role and aspect of a social media marketer or manager. And with just one platform, its users are able to do the very simple and basic stuffs. Like curate cool content and schedule posts all the way up to managing team members and measuring ROI.
Remarkably, there are several different plans to choose from. From a single user plan, all the way up to a customized enterprise account — that’s suitable for much larger organizations. Below are the topmost key advantages that you’ll get from Hootsuite.
Light up your channels
With more than 18 million customers, Hootsuite delivers the global scale and insights you need to succeed with social—whether you’re managing a small team or expanding your social brand across hundreds of locations.
Discover what’s possible when you unite your social campaigns on one platform.
- Plan: View and manage all your social content in a single collaborative calendar.
- Create: Make it easy for your entire team to create beautiful, engaging posts for every social network.
- Schedule: Keep your social presence active 24/7 by automatically scheduling posts to fill the gaps in your calendar.
In short, Hootsuite allows you to schedule and publish content to the right channels at the right time. As well as track effectiveness in real-time, and crank the volume on your top-performing content.
Make the connections that matter
Hootsuite’s open platform integrates with tools you already use—like Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, and Adobe. Plus, dive deep and find fresh insights with social analytics integrations and apps including Brandwatch and Talkwalker.
From building your brand to delivering customer care, keep the conversation flowing seamlessly across public channels and private messages. So that you can connect with customers on social at every step of their journey.
- Inbox: Engage with customers across public and private social channels—in one place.
- Streams: Monitor activity and engage at scale across all your social networks.
- Library: Save time and improve response quality with a shared content library of on-brand social content and assets.
Basically, ”the secret of our success on social media comes from the consistency we brought to all our social channels and in understanding our audiences.”
Align your stars
Train your teams and build a baseline of skills across your organization with industry-leading training and certification from Hootsuite Academy. Their experts handle the technical heavy lifting, training your teams, and guiding your strategy with data-backed best practices.
And when it comes to aligning stars, everyone has a role to play. Whereby, you’ll give your team the social platform and skills they need to step into the spotlight. As well as strengthen relationships with customers, and drive business results.
- Teams: Align and secure your social organization with smart, secure, team management, and permissions.
- Assignments: Boost response times and efficiency by assigning tasks to the right team or region.
- Academy: Through Hootsuite Academy, you’ll always stay ahead with industry-leading training and certification.
In other words, discover what’s possible when you get social. From non-profits and small businesses to governments and the Fortune 500, they partner with organizations large and small to transform the way they do business. So, how does it work? And how can I benefit from Hootsuite?
How does Hootsuite work?
Hootsuite has one advantage over other social media management apps. And it’s one of the more reasonably priced apps around the Internet – as long as you’ve got relatively simple needs. However, its prices do rise considerably for larger teams and businesses.
Predominantly, their main application focuses on social media publishing. And in that case, you’ll need to buy a separate app (Hootsuite Insights) if you are looking for social listening capabilities. This will help to keep your ear to the ground with instant analysis of millions of real-time conversations happening online.
You’ll also find out what your customers are doing, feeling, and thinking when it all comes to your brand. Also, get to the heart of the conversation when launching a new product. Quickly find out when it’s best to roll it out, identify thought leaders, and find brand advocates that your competitors may miss.
The main Core of Hootsuite is Streams
You set up a tab for each of your social networks on the Streams page. Then, for each social account, you add a series of streams. You can use these streams in many ways, making them effectively a replacement for your actual social account. They’re also handy for finding additional content for you to share.
You can make any replies directly from within Hootsuite. And if you are creating original posts (or Pins on the case of Pinterest), you can use the handy Publisher screen. Eventually, that shows you a calendar, slotting in any new posts as you make them.
Depending on your plan, you can access a variety of analytics, helping you determine the success of your posting strategy. And by the same fashion, if you operate Hootsuite as part of a team, you can easily see which items are assigned either to or from you.
Overall, Hootsuite offers a robust set of social management capabilities, in an easy-to-use clear interface. And if you may, consider having a look at more review details in this article. Below are more additional key features;
1. Analytics
Hootsuite offers a number of inbuilt analytics functionalities. You’ll quickly be able to look at performance over time. And even compare different time periods for each of the social media accounts you’ve got plugged into the platform.
Again, this helps social media managers monitor things all in one place.
2. Collaboration
Hootsuite offers an inbox view of private messages directed at multiple social media accounts across different platforms. Meaning that they all appear in one place.
Social media managers can assign team members to each message to make sure no query goes un-replied. This is a particularly cool feature for larger teams who receive a high volume of queries from customers and prospects each day. On the other hand, their customer service follows neatly on from team collaboration.
In addition, using a mix of streams and the inbox feature, social teams are able to view and respond to customer complaints. And also, praise as they happen, without things getting lost. As consumers continue to expect a quick response when they reach out to a brand with a problem on social, this is something that’s particularly important to master.
Keeping in mind, negative customer service experiences can be terrible for customer loyalty which is hard enough to garner in itself.
3. Monitoring
Streams of new mentions, followers, and likes can help you keep up to date with what interactions with your social media accounts.
So to speak, they make monitoring multiple accounts and different kinds of interactions easy for community managers. These streams allow for all mentions, across multiple platforms, appear in one place. Streams are unlimited and customizable, so you can keep track of what’s important.
4. Scheduling
It doesn’t take a genius to work out that the timing of social posts is important. If you’re tweeting when your audience is offline, the chances of them seeing your post are pretty low. Meanwhile, if you tweet ten things at once you’re probably going to clog people’s news feeds. And as a result, you’ll promptly lose followers.
The best way to go about timing your posts appropriately is to use a solution that helps find the best times for you. With Hootsuite, it’s a simple process. You simply click ‘New Post’, select which accounts you’d like to post from, add the text, and any appropriate media, then hit “Schedule for later.”
The post will then be added to your stream of scheduled posts. After all, which you can view alongside other ‘streams’ of things. Like your owned tweets, @mentions, and new followers.
5. Extensions
Through its numerous extensions, you can take the guesswork out of data analysis. And as such, turn data into insights faster with Iris™, your personal AI analyst.
Cut through the noise, uncover emerging trends, and spot important conversations that others miss. In the end, there are lots of ways you can add to what Hootsuite has to offer as a standard. Below are just a couple of considerable apps and extensions to your rescue:
- Marketo: Marketo integration provides marketers with a bridge between their social media interactions and their Marketo lead database. Allowing users to create leads in Marketo from relevant Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram activity.
- Hootlet: Hootlet is a free add-on for Chrome users that allows Hootsuite customers to immediately share cool things they come across online from multiple social media accounts. This will also work with scheduling, so you could come across a cool article and share it a few hours later without even being on the Hootsuite platform.
- Amplify: A favorite of the jmexclusives social team is Amplify, by Hootsuite, which is amazing for employee advocacy. It allows social managers to point employees towards new posts and content to share, boosting the reach of branded content. It’s easy to measure and incentivize. You can find out more about it here.
Additionally, the MailChimp app allows you to share and track your email campaigns from within Hootsuite. You’ll be able to view campaign stats, including open rate, click rate, and more. As well as subscriber stats, including new and lost subscribers.
Related Topic: What is Content Dripping? & How does it really work?
Equally important, the Adobe Stock for Hootsuite allows you to use assets you have licensed in Adobe Stock directly in Hootsuite. As well as search for and license assets from within the publisher.
As can be seen, I’ve provided you with a snapshot of the uses of Hootsuite here, but there are plenty of ways you can use it. So, with that in mind, you can visit the Hootsuite official website to give it a try. You can also see a whole bunch of apps you can connect with Hootsuite.
Hootsuite Pricing
As a SaSS platform, access to Hootsuite is sold on a monthly basis. Hootsuite offers four paid plans, as well as a free plan. All paid plans can be paid on a monthly or yearly basis.
Be that as it may, all the listed prices reflect a discount for an annual payment. Equivalent to approximately 3 months free, e.g., The Team Plan costs either $189/mo (monthly) or $1,548 – ($129/mo) if paid annually.
Below are the main Hootsuite Pricing Plans:
- Free, $0/mo – 3 social accounts, 1 user, 30 scheduled messages.
- Professional, $29/mo – 10 social accounts, 1 user, unlimited scheduled messages, automated post scheduling, key performance metrics, ad spend limit of $500 per month to boost posts.
- Team, $129/mo – 20 social accounts, 3 users, unlimited scheduled messages, automated post scheduling, key performance metrics, custom analytics, exportable reports, ad spend limit of $2,000 per month to boost posts.
- Business, $599/mo – 35 social accounts, 5-10 users, unlimited scheduled messages, automated post scheduling, key performance metrics, custom analytics, exportable reports, ad spend limit of $5,000 per month to boost posts, flexible approval workflows.
- Enterprise, $custom/mo –custom solutions.
- Hootsuite Insights, $custom/mo, and many more plans.
As with all these social media management apps you begin by setting up an account and selecting a plan to meet your needs.
The free plan is basic but could still meet the needs of somebody with limited social aspirations. You at least get 30 messages, meaning that you could post once daily to your preferred social account on the free plan.
Takeaway,
One challenge that a lot of businesses have with social media branding is building initial traction. Getting your first few followers can seem impossible when you don’t even know where to start.
However, if you’ve been in business for a while or have other Web properties (like a website blog, or other social media accounts) then you should start there. Furthermore, unless you tell your current customers, colleagues, and network that you have a Snapchat or Instagram account, how will they know?
Never make the mistake of just assuming everyone knows about all your social media channels, even within your own company. It’s also important to realize, users, engage with social media posts that include images more than with posts that don’t include images.
Related Topic: What Is Social Media Branding? A Small Businesses Guide
For example, you can add infographics, photographs, and other visual images to your weblog posts. And then, take advantage of Pinterest and Tumblr, which can be used to store and share visual content. But also, don’t post for the sake of posting. Therefore, keep social media posts relevant, meaningful, and simple.
Keeping in mind, posting too frequently, and posting ‘boring’ content are the main reasons people will unfollow and unlike brands.
Finally, I hope the above guide was useful to your business as well as your social media team. But, if you’ll need more help, you can Contact Us or even share your additional questions and requests in the comments section. Also, don’t forget to donate in order to support our online research work, blog articles, and help us grow together with you.
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