How to Use Hootsuite to Cut Your Social Media Efforts in Half

How Does Hootsuite Work

How Does Hootsuite WorkTwitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube.

Does your law firm use all these social media platforms? Are you consistently posting on even one of them?

If you only post to share information about new hires and other company news, you’re missing out.

On what?

Market research on your firm’s target clients, news about ongoing cases, opportunity to weigh in on significant issues in your practice, and potential leads—you’re missing out on all of this.

According to the 2015 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report, 76% of law firms now have an online presence, a 21% growth from 2012. Lawyers spend an average of 1.6 hours a week engaging in different social platforms. Networking and career development (71%) tops their list of reasons for going online, followed by client development or engagement at 48%.

Without a proper strategy, 1.6 hours a week is hardly enough time to manage and optimize your social networks to the fullest. That’s hardly enough time to answer messages and post a couple of status updates.

The answer is Hootsuite, a social media tool that, used properly, can cut your social media efforts in half.

How does Hootsuite Work to Save You Time?

One Dashboard for Everything

With Hootsuite, you can access all of your social accounts—Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and so much more—in one dashboard. So that immediately saves you time switching from one network to another, no more posting the same message into multiple networks manually.

Here’s a short list of what you can see under Hootsuite’s Streams. This list isn’t complete, as there are too many options.

  • Facebook personal profile timeline
  • Facebook pages
  • Twitter feed
  • Twitter feed for specific lists created
  • LinkedIn timeline
  • LinkedIn pages
  • LinkedIn groups
  • Streams for specific search terms

Bulk Uploads and Auto Scheduling

With its bulk scheduling feature, you can upload multiple messages at one or more social networks at the time and date you choose. Your tweets and updates will be published on time, even if you’re asleep.

Not sure what’s the best time to post a tweet?

Hootsuite’s auto schedule feature looks for the best time to post your update based on your follower’s demographics. It’s a good option if you’re totally clueless about your market’s schedule, but don’t rely on this feature too much.

How To Use Hootsuite AutoSchedule

How to Use Hootsuite to Save Time in Your Marketing

Share While Browsing the Web

Logging in to Facebook or Twitter just to share an interesting article or quote you read online takes time. Yes, maybe just 2 minutes to post the link and a snappy message. But if you do that every day for a month, that’s 1 hour! And that’s not even including the time you’ll waste if you get sucked into the distracting videos and memes in your newsfeed.

Using Hootlet, Hootsuite’s browser plug-in, you can share content you read without logging into any of your accounts.

 
If you find something interesting, just click on Hootlet’s icon on your browser. It will automatically shorten the page’s URL and add a short snippet describing it, so you don’t need to write anything if you don’t want to.

Curate Status Updates in Advance

Content curation is the process of looking for other valuable content (videos, articles, news, status updates, infographics, etc) in your niche, and then sharing them with your audience.

Why do it? 3 Reasons:

  1. Creating original content that’s both informative, evergreen, and shareable is hard to do regularly
  2. Because curation shows your audience that you’re a reliable source of good information, and not just a promoter of your own work.
  3. Finding and sharing other people’s content keeps you updated, and puts you in the radar of other influencers.

How to Curate Content for a Law Firm

  1. Identify the markets you serve and the topics they’re interested in.

Divorce lawyers, for instance, work with divorcees in the process of entangling their personal and financial possessions from their marriage. Aside from typical questions like, “Who gets custody?” their clients may also interested in tips about being a single parent. Sharing content about these two subtopics will be helpful to your audience.

  1. Look for influencers creating the content you need.

Don’t RT stuff other lawyers in your niche already shared. That’s not content curation; you’re just promoting other people’s expertise. It’s not a bad strategy to build a professional relationship with other lawyers. But it’s bad if your goal is to establish your expertise.

Always find the original source. Going back to the previous example, you can share content about child custody, alimony, asset division, and other legal concerns by searching for completed and publicly available case studies, amendments on existing laws, or studies on these topics.

  1. Use Google Alerts and other news aggregators

No need to manually search content every time you post something. Sites like SmartBrief, Fark, and Alltop, curates content on different industries. Just visit these sites and pick the articles that match your requirements.

With Feedly and Google Alerts, you can enter search terms and get weekly or daily email updates when new content matching your search criteria is published.

  1. Always credit your source.

Crediting your source protects you from plagiarism claims, and helps you build a relationship with other subject matter experts related to your niche. Tagging the authors on Twitter and other social media can also earn you an RT, or ‘like’ from the creator.

 

Bulk Upload Posts

You can schedule up to 350 posts with Hootsuite’s bulk message upload. That 350 is the total limit for all social networks though.

Want to schedule posts for multiple networks? Just divide the limit into equal parts. For instance, posting in five networks, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+, YouTube, and WordPress, means you can schedule up to 50 posts in advance for each network.

This feature only works if you upload the updates using a comma separated value file (CSV). The first column is the date and time, second column contains the message you want to post, and the third column contains the URL. Don’t bother shortening it because Hootsuite does this for you.

Hootsuite Tutorial Bulk Upload Format CSV

Hootsuite tutorial for using the bulk uploader:

  1. Select the paper airplane icon (Publisher) on the menu.
  2. Click “Bulk Message Upload” under “Content Sources.”
  3. Choose your CSV file, then click “Open.”
  4. Pick the correct date and format used in your CSV file.
  5. Select the social network/s you want to publish in then click “Submit.”

How Does Hootsuite Work Bulk Message Uploader

You’ll see a confirmation message if your upload is successful. If not, you’ll see an error message that tells you exactly what needs to be corrected.

Use Hootsuite Smartly

Not sure how to use Hootsuite for your law firm? Email us for a brainstorming and strategy session so we can create a custom strategy to start building your authority using social media.

If you just want more information about how the tool works, Hootsuite has a ‘university’ complete with online tutorials and video walk-throughs.

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