It’s September and I am back with another guide for the bookish blogging community, and this time I am here to tell you all you need to know about scheduling tweets using Hootsuite and why you should!
You may or may not know this, but for my day job fundraising in higher education, I also manage the social media strategy for my unit. I have four years of professional social media strategy experience, and countless training and collaboration with others in the field helped me hone these skills to put them to work with my personal account when I decided to use it for my book blog back in April. I wanted to create a guide to pay it forward to the blogging community!
So… what is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is a Social Media Management System that allows you to not only schedule tweets in advance (free version allows up to 30 at a time, unlike the 10 at a time that Buffer allows), but also monitor specific hashtags and more! You can actually use Hootsuite for multiple social media platforms all in one place, but for the purposes of this guide, I am going to focus on Twitter and Pinterest.
Three Reasons to use Hootsuite for Twitter
1. You can schedule Tweets in advance.
2. You can customize your Homepage with the streams that most match your needs.
3. Analytics!
Setting up your homepage and streams
So this is what my homepage – or dashboard – looks like. Each of the four categories you see (scheduled, home, my tweets, blogger karass) are called Streams and you can customize how your dashboard looks based on your preferences!
➡️ Scheduled is a stream for my scheduled posts, which you can also access by clicking the paper airplane icon on the left; I just like having it there.
➡️ Home is the homepage of Twitter and all the tweets you see when logged onto Twitter.com.
➡️ My Tweets is pretty self-explanatory, this is a stream of all your tweets
➡️ Blogger Karass is a custom stream that I made using the list of my blogging besties so I don’t miss out on their posts!
➡️ I also have a stream you cannot see in the screenshot for #bookbloggers that feeds all posts using that hashtag.
There are many options for streams that you can have, and some of the most useful are following keywords and hashtags. Here is a screenshot of the Twitter stream options (remember how I mentioned you can use Hootsuite for lots of other social media platforms?! See below!).
To add a stream simply click on the + icon. You can drag and drop the order of your streams on the dashboard as well, and if you change your mind you can delete streams easily by clicking the vertical ellipses on the top right of the stream and selecting Delete.
Creating your analytics report
The analytics report, if this is something you are interested in, is fantastic and a bit more robust & easy to read than the one straight from Twitter. It is important to set up the report as soon as you set up your Hootsuite account as it will not retroactively track your analytics.
Click on the bar graph image in the left navigation, and then click on the “Build Custom Report” button under Customize. The Twitter and Facebook profile reports are free.
Once you get to the report builder, you can customize it to include tracking of specific keywords in addition to follower growth, most popular links (you will need to shorten the links via Hootsuite using ow.ly for them to track here), and your profile summary. Once you create the report you will be brought back to the dashboard and you can load your actual report and an emailed copy will be sent to you monthly.
Scheduling your posts
The free version of Hootsuite allows you to schedule up to 30 posts at a time, which should be enough for the casual book blogger that posts 3-4 times per week on their blog and promotes other posts throughout the week for an entire month! I personally schedule Tweets once a week and aim to have at least one scheduled post that drives traffic to my blog per day.
You can easily access all of your scheduled tweets by clicking the paper airplane icon on the left.
At the top of the dashboard there is a text box to the right of your Twitter username and to the left of the green New post button… if you click in that textbox a post box will appear for you to draft your tweet:
So that’s it… all I need is about 15-30 minutes per week to schedule out my tweets and ensure that I am remaining active on Twitter and sharing my content strategically throughout the week! You will need to click the little calendar for the scheduler to pop-up. Once you have picked the date and time you want the tweet to be sent out, click the blue schedule button and it will show up in your Publisher.
If you need to edit your tweet, click the edit icon and you can easily edit the text or change the date/time that it is scheduled.
The auto-scheduler is an option that you can use if you schedule a bunch of content and perhaps want to do so a bit more frequently than once a week. If you turn it on it automatically spaces out posts that you schedule for the day based on parameters that you set by clicking the wheel icon.
I find it useful professionally but not so much for blogging purposes, but that doesn’t mean that you might find it useful! Just keep in mind the 30 scheduled post limit with the free account because that will affect how often you need to go in to schedule posts.
Scheduling Pins via Hootsuite
I originally wrote this guide back in July 2018 focusing solely on Twitter, but in the time that I have scheduled this post and today when it is finally being shared with you all I have begun using it to schedule my Pins for Pinterest and it is a freaking lifesaver! I simply had to include Pins here because you will be amazed.
I hardly use Pinterest, but I like at least create pins for my posts to (hopefully) drive traffic over to my blog. The problem is because I don’t really use Pinterest personally and I schedule my blog posts out in advance, I forget to post my pins. But you can schedule pins on Hootsuite fam! It is really easy, too! Click the down arrow in the “new post” button and select “New pin.”
It will bring you to a new page where you can add all the pin information and schedule it to post to Pinterest whenever you want. Note that the scheduled pins do not show up in the publisher and you cannot edit them once scheduled.
Do you schedule your Tweets out using Hootsuite or another service like Tweetdeck? If not, is there a reason that you haven’t yet? I would love to hear your thoughts down in the comments!
💖 If you like the work that I do here at Reader Voracious, consider fueling my pumpkin spice latte and black tie addiction by buying me a ko-fi! ☕
Let’s go on another adventure together!
wonderful post, Kaleena! I just downloaded it and can’t wait to start using it!
I am glad you found the post useful, and let me know if you have any questions!
I wll! thank you for being awesome Kaleena!
This is so useful, Kaleena! I was thinking about starting to schedule tweets, but I don’t have much time at the moment, so finding out how to do it seemed a bit more that I could do right now, but thanks to you I don’t have to worry more about it. I will definitely be using Hootsuite. Thanks!!! 💛
I am glad that you find the post useful, Sofia! I definitely hear you on time – I found that overall it takes maybe 30 mins once a week to schedule out stuff, which alleviates my guilt if I unplug because I still have content going out. Let me know how it goes for you when you have the time to check it out, and I am happy to answer questions!
Speechless! You’re literally changing bloggers lives!
Awww, thank you so much Hamad!
Welcome <3
This sounds like the most fantastic and practical app in the world! I still have no clue how to work Twitter efficiently (I just barely figured out how to make lists so I could narrow down my feed to only show my blogging besties! I’m so ancient in my ways. Hahaha!), but will definitely check out this app! Thanks for sharing, Kaleena! <3
Twitter lists CHANGED MY LIFE! Glad you found that out, yay! Let me know if you have any questions when poking around!
Fantastic post! I’ve seen this around but never used it before. Such a great tool though.
It’s definitely my favorite free social media scheduler and aggregator out there. I hope you check it out sometime, and let me know if you have any questions.
I definitely will! Thanks ☺️
Kaleena The Twitter Queen single-handedly changes all of our lives with one (1) blog post. 👑
*blushes* aww thank you so much, Lily! I know you just joined Twitter so if you ever have questions let me know.
My blog uses wordpress, and I use Jetpack, a WP plugin, which automatically sends out a tweet every time I publish a post. So in answer to your question: no. I don’t use Hootsuite.
I also have my posts tweet automatically, but I like to tweet about each post more than once (timezones are a primary reason, but also because a tweet really only stays “fresh” for 13 minutes). This tool is here if you ever decide to further promote and want to “automate” it!
Ah, now that makes sense. I might give this a look see then, thanks.
You’re welcome!
Wow! Id idnt know this was a thing this sounds like it will make Twitter so much easier for me thank you. I havent rveb tried yet for Pinterest maybe some other day.
I am glad to have helped, and I hope that you find it useful for Twitter! I am honestly still trying to figure out Pinterest, but I like being able to schedule pins instead of forgetting altogether LOL
Wow, I am way behind the times. This is an amazing post, especially since you have professional experience with social media. Thanks for sharing!
Glad that you found the post helpful, Tammy! If you ever have any questions let me know.
Great post!
I’ve been using Hootsuite for awhile, but really only use it to schedule posts. I’d like to be able to create some custom streams like you have done, especially isolating particular twitter accounts. I’ve tried, but it automatically tracks “New Followers.” Can you explain how to do that?
Thank you!
I started using it only to schedule as well, but the custom streams really help (especially professionally). When you click on “Add Stream” you will want to select the “lists” tab at the top of the popup box. If you don’t have a list created you can from Hootsuite I guess, but it may be easier to do on Twitter itself. You can add specific people to lists and that way when you view that TL it is all of their tweets.
I’ll DM you a screenshot. 🙂
Thank you!
You’re welcome, and thanks for checking out the post!
Omg I’m overwhelmed.
Oh no, how can I help?!
Honestly there’s so much you can do, but if all you wanna do is schedule it’s pretty life changing and straightfoward.
I’m pretty new to blogging and Twitter itself. I just feel like every time I feel like I know what I’m doing I find out that there is so much more that I don’t know about. Like SEO and stuff like this.
It’s just that I’ve never heard of it and I’m just kind of confused. Is this one of those wordpress plugins you need to pay for? Do you even link it to your blog? It just looks SO complex. I mean I can definitely see the advantage to using it. Is it an app or a website?
Ah yea all that can be a lot to take in at first!
This isn’t a WordPress plugin; it is a completely free social media scheduling tool. Hootsuite.com is where you go and you can prewrite and schedule tweets to promote your blog across timezones.
I saw something that looked like there was also a wordpress tab. Maybe I’m mistaken.. I understand the purpose, but it just looks complicated. I think I’m going to look into it and refer back to this guide then
Good luck!
Awesome post, Kaleena! I love scheduling tweets so that readers from various timezones will see them. 🙂 I just use the WordPress plugin, Revive Old Posts, which is so much easier and automated. I really need to start scheduling my pins as well! I’ll bookmark this post for when I’m a bit less lazy to do so. 😍😂
Thank you Aimee, and YES I primarily schedule for timezones! Revive Old Posts looks awesome but alas, I am not self hosted so I have to put in a little more work.
This is such a great and useful post, thank you so much for sharing! <3 I work in social media a little bit as well and learned to use Hootsuite for that and it's such a useful, great tool, I agree. I'm not using it for my twitter just yet – I need to create a whole new account, I use tweetdeck to schedule a couple tweets here and there from time to time so far, but I really should use that tool too 🙂 Thank you for sharing! 🙂
Thank you so much for sharing your experience as well!
I love Hootsuite and I still use it occasionally. I love that it is complex and has a lot options. I use Buffer more frequently when I want to keep things really simple.
I agree, I love all the extra options – especially the streams because I am able to catch things I don’t want to miss all one one dashboard!
This is SO HELPFUL!! I had no idea this was possible!! I can’t wait to go set up a Hootsuite account!! Thank you!! Thank you!! Thank you!!
You’re so welcome, Theresa! I hope this is helpful for you and let me know if you have any questions or anything!
Interesting posts. Wish you could see scheduled pins though.
Thank you, and so do I!