Hootsuite - Reclaim control of your social media

Hi! My name is Sara Maurice Whitver. I am the First-Year Experience Librarian at The University of Alabama Libraries. I manage the Amelia Gayle Gorgas facebook page, the GorgasLib Twitter account, the Gorgas Library Google+ account, and other social media accounts that we have at Gorgas. Today, I'm going to talk to you about a tool that I really like called Hootsuite. Recently, I conducted a workshop at the Alabama Digital Humanities Center on the same topic. My talk was primarily about how to use this tool is a social media manager and I discussed some of the challenges and concerns that a social media managers in higher education environments. If you'd like to review my materials from the presentation please follow this link. The workshop was live-tweeted-- you can review those tweets by using the hashtag #UAhootsuite. OK so let's get started. Hootsuite is a social media management platform that integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+ and Wordpress. There are few other networks that work with hootsuite but we're not going to worry about them today-- these of the ones that I use. It's easy to create a Hootsuite account: go to hootsuite.com and click "sign up" Your username is your email address With the free version, you can manage up to five different social media accounts Hootusite is web-based, so there isn't anything to download onto your computer. If you're accessing it through mobile device like an iPad or a smartphone, you will need to download the app. I use the app on both my phone and my iPad but today we're going to focus on the normal web interface. There is very little difference between web access on a desktop and app access on a mobile device they look and operate similarly. Hootsuite lets you organize information into what it calls streams. Streams are filtered portions of information. This is really useful for Twitter. I don't know how you feel about the native to the interface but frankly I don't like it very much there's no conversation context and very little ability to organize the native twitter interface equals information overload, which is why I was originally attracted to hootsuite. because hootsuite allows you to filter your twitter feed in this way, it's worth doing a bit of pre-planning before you set your account up. Think about what you want out of your account and how do you want to see your information. this is how I have my information setup. I want to see conversations are happening in or about the library, conversations around campus or at other branches and around town and then of course I want to monitor facebook and Google+ So, how does this look? I have a stream set up with hashtags #gorgaslibrary, #gorgaslib, and gorgas. I have a stream setup with #bamaproblems and I have streams for mentions of @gorgaslib, my direct messages and sent tweets. lets take a look at my second tab Let's take a look at my second tab. Here I have my home feed I follow my campus partners, other academic libraries across the country, and the other units with in UA libraries I also have my Gorgas facebook page and my Gorgas Google+ page Alright, let's talk about creating new tabs and streams. To create a new tab, simply click the + button to the right of the tabs menu at the top of the window You can rename your tab by clicking on it To add a stream to your tab, click the "Add New Stream" button. This button is always located at the top left quadrant of the screen but in a new tab, it's also available in the middle of the window.