We love Hootsuite. It does the heavy lifting for so many social media tasks. Need to schedule posts when you’re out of office? No problem. Looking for analytics that will help calculate ROI across platforms? Totally doable. Want to make it easier to catch all of your customers’ questions on Twitter? Too easy.
Our marketing team uses Hootsuite, as do many of our customers’ marketing teams. In fact, it’s the most widely used platform for managing social media. It’s used by more than 14 million people around the globe and trusted by more than 800 of the Fortune 1,000.
Hootsuite is loaded with features, but to get the most out of this invaluable resource, you need to connect it to a digital asset management (DAM) platform. The Webdam plug-in for Hootsuite creates a seamless connection. In seconds, you can pull engaging images from your DAM directly into your posts and share them with followers across your social channels.
The plug-in allows you to access the content you need from one source and deploy it from your Hootsuite dashboard. This reduces the time spent hunting around for videos and images. The time you save can go right back into developing new content and having conversations with your followers and fans.
Find content fast and share it faster.
Social media is about as visually oriented as it gets, which is why you want to use as much photography, illustration and video as you can. Text only posts just don’t perform as well as media enriched posts. Hashtags and emojis can only do so much.
Content with relevant images gets 94% more views. Social media posts with images and video are 10 times more likely to grab greater engagement. But finding the right image isn’t always convenient. Content is usually created in one platform. Images are stored and searched somewhere else (hopefully somewhere searchable). The process for finding, uploading and placing images in your social content can turn into a major time suck.
With our plug-in, all you have to do is create and schedule social media posts as usual. When it comes time to add images, there’s no longer a need to open up a browser, search through your media library, download the asset (or assets), and finally, upload them to Hootsuite. That takes forever.
Instead, simply click the icon to open up your Webdam asset library within Hootsuite. Search, browse and choose the assets you want right there – no need to download, upload or click back and forth between windows. This streamlined processes mean you can grab the images that create conversations and make your customers pay attention.
Hootsuite and DAM features make life easier.
If your company is heavily involved in social media, you probably have several different platforms running. Most people have a presence on the big sites, like Facebook and Twitter, but you might also be holding onto older sites, like Myspace. Why you’d be doing that is a mystery to us, but hey, do you.
When new social media companies emerge, it’s worth getting a consistent handle that reinforces your brand (for example, we are @webdam just about everywhere). Even if you aren’t totally sold on the new tech on the block, grab the handle you want early so no one else can use it. You never know what the kids are going to go crazy over, and studies show the earliest adopters of social media platforms usually tend to have strong presences over time. So don’t be afraid to get in early on new sites.
The biggest resistance to trying out new sites is perceived lack of time. Learning a new technology takes effort, but these days there isn’t a whole lot to deal with. Social media sites are built for ease of adoption. However, keeping track of the emerging conversations on your new channel will take time if you’re doing it right. That’s a place where Hootsuite is exceptionally handy.
You can manage all of your accounts from the same Hootsuite dashboard. This includes different accounts on the same site. For example, you might have multiple regional identities on Twitter. By using Hootsuite, you can craft messages on all of them, editing each post to fit specific audiences. What’s really cool is that you can see all of them on the same screen. From there you can just reach into your DAM and drop the images you think will work best.
Social media teamwork makes the dream work.
If you have a bunch of different people running your social media, you probably have encountered a number of issues. When more than one person is involved, things might get double posted or the tone might shift a bit too much. Consistency is huge for branding in general, but especially so on social media.
There are also security concerns. As employees come and go, you don’t want anyone who shouldn’t have access to your accounts remain able to get in there. You can manage all of your passwords from Hootsuite. Webdam supports single sign-on, too. That means you don’t have to keep logging in as you shift between programs. Once you’re signed in, it’s easy to grab files from Webdam and use them in Hootsuite. And it’s easy to restrict those functions with permissions in Webdam.
Hootsuite is also super helpful if you use a team to respond to customers. It allows you to delegate conversation responsibilities to different team members. For example if you receive 100 mentions in one day, you can assign each one to a different person.
When a team member is logged in, they’ll see which tasks have been given to them and not accidentally respond to a status that has already been replied to. Each person responding can access the DAM as needed for their posts.
Always know what’s going on online.
Just about every social media company offers analytics to help you figure out what is and isn’t working. But Hootsuite lets you see everything together, so you know what’s working from a holistic point of view. Finding your top posts and determining numbers of likes is super easy in Hootsuite. That said, it can be helpful to have additional data.
In Webdam, you can view reports that show who is using your DAM, what actions have been taken, and more. Reports provide the data you need to optimize your investment and your assets. This can help you better understand which assets are working and which aren’t. This information will help you save time because you’ll no longer be making things that aren’t needed (at least not as many).
Take back your time.
Hootsuite and Webdam won’t solve all of your problems magically, but they will bring order to your process. That gives you more time. With more time you can actually solve your stickiest problems. You might even be able to devote more time to creative tasks, like shooting great Instagram pics.
No matter how many followers you have or likes you get, it helps to be more organized. With less friction in your daily tasks, you’ll be able to put more energy into what matters most, having great conversations with your community.
