Using Hootsuite Pro to Drive Blog Traffic: 4 Smart Tips
Are you desperately searching for the 25th hour? If you’re like me you’re a busy blogger.
Life can feel overwhelming at times. Between raising a family, working a full time job and tending to other duties you may feel exhausted when it’s time to share your latest blog post.
Enter automation.
Automating leverages your time. Most “tool users” save themselves 30 minutes or more daily just by purchasing and using an automating app.
I use Hootsuite Pro to automate effectively and to save time.
Benefits of Using Hootsuite Pro
- Save 30 or more minutes daily
- Free up time to spend with your family
- Reach audiences across multiple time zones
- Reach a large audience across platforms by posting to multiple groups
Ready for the tips?
Post to Targeted Multiple Groups
Hootsuite Pro gives you the ability to post to multiple groups on Facebook and LinkedIn simultaneously. Target each group. Avoid the newbie automating mistake of posting to as many groups as possible.
Example; some new HSP users join 200 groups between LinkedIn and Facebook. Said users link to each group – many having nothing to do with their niche – and post away.
If nobody from the groups cares about your message stop wasting your time. Target your groups. I’d post only to “blogging tips” themed groups to speak to my targeted audience.
But Don’t Post to too many Groups….Space out Updates
The silly automating approach – or lazy approach – dictates that you’d post to 30, 40 or 50 groups on LinkedIn and Facebook simultaneously. Not a good move. Why?
First off, Facebook sees this as spamming and will block your Hootsuite Pro updates.
Secondly, think of your targeted users. Some check groups at 8 AM, some at noon, and full time job folks check FB groups at perhaps 8 PM. Stagger your updates to increase the chances of connecting with your ideal readers at different times.
Update to a total of 10 Facebook and/or LinkedIn groups at one time. Anything more sets up a social media spamming red flag and minimizes your chances of connecting with your ideal reader.
Develop Global Appeal
Social media guru Guy Kawasaki schedules new blog posts 3 times daily on twitter. He wants to reach a global audience.
Follow his lead (although 2 updates may do the trick for you too). Even if most of your target market resides in Australia you likely don’t want to ignore the United States crowd, unless you’re blogging to promote a local business.
Use Hootsuite Pro to send out your new posts 2 to 3 times daily. Send out new posts at 8 AM and 8 PM.
Engage Engage and Engage Some More….but Stagger Responses
Engaging is the secret sauce which makes your automation campaign pop. Show that a real, genuine, living, breathing human is at the controls of your automating campaign. This helps your audience to trust you.
But you can’t stuff the stream with 15 “Thank You” tweets in 2 minutes. Few users tolerate this behavior, and you’ll be unfollowed by a bunch of folks quickly.
Here’s the solution; with Hootsuite Pro you can schedule twitter @replies in the future, spaced out each hour, according to your target market’s time zone.
You may check your HSP app at 8 AM. Sift through @replies, tweet back a “Thank You”, or perhaps a question, and schedule these engagement tweets for 9:30 AM, 10:30 AM and so on. Schedule up to 5 engagement tweets but no more, to save yourself time and to focus on what matters.
You can even schedule engagement tweets 1 or 2 days in the future if you want to really space them out.
Now it’s Your Turn
Check out my automation tool of choice. Take a Free Trial Run of Hootsuite Pro
Do you automate?
Do you use Hootsuite Pro?
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Written by Catherine Holt
Catherine Holt is the founder of Blogging Tips 101. She has been an internet marketer since 2012. Connect with her on Twitter, Facebook, Google and Pinterest.
Hi Catherine,
Engaging makes the hootsuite pro engine go. I too use HSP and have found that chatters generate a ton of interest, and get more clicks too.
The quality of your automating campaign rests on your willingness to post some links, and some text. Text updates may be questions, or responses, or gratitude updates….whatever the type of text, just engage frequently so your followers and friends don’t suffer from link blindness.
I ignore any social user who automates even 70% of the time, let along 90% of the time or 100%. Boring. If they care not to chat, or listen, I don’t care to chat or listen, and I’ll never click on their links.
Gotta make social a 2 way street. If you engage, and automate, the 2 way street effect inspires folks to listen, to click, to share and to engage you. That’s the great secret. Careful engaging, and listening, inspires people to pay heed to your automated updates instead of tuning them out.
Catherine, super post.
I’ll tweet it through Triberr.
Ryan
You hit the nail on the head there Ryan “Careful engaging and listening”. Social is about being social…it’s not just about being automated. Whilst automation helps you focus and save you time, if you leave out the engagement then the automation is still not going to do you any favors. You must be prepared to respond to your listeners, but also to engage with others in order to have your links commented on and shared.
Thanks for your valuable feedback Ryan
I don’t use HSP but I do use hootsuite from time to time. I need to be better about it. I also used to do a better job of posting my stuff to groups, but I had to let a lot of that go. I know that distribution is more than half the battle, but I’d rather spend my extra time building relationships because that’s what I really enjoy. Besides, most of the groups I’ve joined don’t see much engagement anyway. Do you have any you like?
Finding groups that engage can be a tricky one Brittany. I do belong to some great groups, but they are private groups that are not adding new members. We are keeping it small. However, there are some great groups on Google+. Boom Social Media With Kim Garst https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/104473674568333068014 and Strategic Social Networking https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/116564172151613669656 are two examples on Google+ that you can build great networks with (if you are prepared to put in the effort). If you don’t engage with others and solely post your links you will get booted out!!!
I must admit that I too go in phases of using automation, but when I do, it really helps my reach. It is something that I also need to pay more attention too.
Thanks for stopping by and sharing with us Brittany
Hello again Catherine,
Thank you for giving me an insight about this ‘Hootsuite Pro’. I must say that I didn’t hear it before. I know exactly what you mean about getting exhausted. In this fast paced life, there isn’t a moment to waste. Job, family, hobbies, extra curricular activities……My, my, my. The list goes on and on. When I was kid, 24 hours seemed to be exceptionally long for a day. But look how things have changed. I wish there were 25 hours. (Laughs) Honestly, after spending so much time on blogging and job related stuffs, there is hardly any time left to spend with our near and dear ones. But what can be done? That’s how life goes. Ain’t it ??!!
Apart from mentioning about this automating apps, I appreciate your tips about it too. I will surely purchase this wonderful thing and implement so that I can make the best of this 24 hours. Thanks dear for once again providing us with this amazing post. You have added yet another valuable apps to my existing pool of them. Wish you a great weekend and hope you enjoy each and every part and moment of your life, be it with your family or in job. Looking forward to more exciting topics from your side.
Regards,
Sanjay……
That’s great to hear that you have found this useful Sanjay. Whilst I can’t guarantee that HSP will provide you with that 25th hour (LOL), it will help you work smarter with the hours that you do have available. With the amount of tasks that there are to do in blogging, let alone everything else in life, it is wise to invest in some small things that will make our life easier.
Automate, share, engage and repeat. This will certainly help set you up for successful social interactions.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us and good luck with the addition of HSP
Hi Catherine
Very informative and helpful post especially for those who can’t manage their role as blogger or internet marketer at social media. This task is really more difficult specially for part-time bloggers of matured age with several personal and professional engagements.
For this purpose automating app is the best way-out to keep you in social media where you earlier have developed a huge base of followers, friends and links apart from a huge timeline of thousands of sharing. You can’t and shouldn’t leave such a huge profile unattended.
You rightly mentioned these automating apps serve the purpose of focussing your global audience also with sharing in different time zones.
The pro version of hootsuite offers so many wonderful benefits. Most important of them is you can share your post in large number of groups of Facebook and Linkedin quite easily.
Thanks for introducing an amazing app to save our time and equally be present at social media with an automated system.
One of the biggest hurdles we come across Mi is sharing with those in different time zones. We often think that everyone is on the same time as us….life is as you know it after all (I too often fall victim to this!). What we need to look at is where our readers are coming from and how we can respond to them in a time appropriate to them. You are not going to sit up all night waiting for the right time and hence enter automation!
Anything that helps us in this crazy world of blogging has got to be useful….lol.
Thanks for popping over and leaving your useful comment. Have an awesome weekend Mi!!