While listening to Laura Roeder’s (@lkr) amazing interview with Hootsuite’s CEO Ryan Holmes (@invoke) there were some seriously hot takeaways.
So I decided to extract some of the most interesting highlights (non-verbatim) and share them with you in case you don’t have 60 minutes to listen to the interview right now (and I highly recommend you listen to the entire interview when you can).
Hootsuite just surpassed 3 million users in 3 years so Ryan knows what he is doing. And Laura is an expert entrepreneur herself who asks some fabulous questions, so between the two of them there’s a lot of sound advice here.
What’s your opinion on outsourcing social media?
Play to your strengths and if you need help with strategy get it. Hootsuite manages all of their social media in house.
Laura sees it as unsuccessful when a business has no involvement in their social media campaigns because part of social media is partially about customer service. Social media is a two way channel and it can be hard for a third party to answer questions about your company.
Using a scheduling tool, like Hootsuite, will help you save time as a small business owner.
What is the best time to post on Twitter and Facebook?
Friday at 1:00 pm Pacific Standard Time (PST)
Should you schedule social media?
Social media expert Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) of UnMarketing is someone Laura really respects and he is strongly opposed to scheduling social media. Laura disagrees; she schedules a lot on social media and then follows up with live responses.
Ryan says scheduling is a must have that has been proven to be very effective. And it also depends, if you’re asking questions you need to be there to respond.
How frequently should a small business owner post on Twitter and Facebook?
It depends; listen to your friends and followers. There isn’t one right answer.
What about Google+?
Google+ is important for marketing for small business owners and a major competitor in social media. Their AdWords product is really smart and tailored to small and medium business. Hootsuite is working very hard to add Google+ to their service. It’s our top requested user feature.
Should you be on Twitter as your brand, yourself, or both?
Tough question, it depends and there’s no right answer. If you are the brand or celebrity it makes sense to use yourself. I chose to do both, create my own account and a Hootsuite account.
Do you think small business owners should create an iPhone app?
It’s not a good strategy in a most cases (unless your business is building an app). Web standard html optimized for mobile is probably a better strategy.
What is your opinion of Klout and the concept of scoring people’s success?
I really like Klout, they’ve done a great job in owning the space of identifying influencers on social media. It’s a great way to filter people based on similar interests.
Does content delivered through a 3rd party like Hootsuite get more interaction than content that’s posted directly to each platform?
No, it’s exactly the same.
Is it OK to post the exact same content at the exact same time to Twitter, Facebook and Google+ or do you need to modify?
It depends on how much time you have. I don’t think it will penalize you in terms of engagement if you do this. And if you do have the time to customize, it can have value. If you had a choice of not posting because it takes too much time to customize it’s better to get the content out so make it the same and send it out. Getting the content out is the most important.
What is a success story about someone who has used Hootsuite and changed their business?
Check out Hootsuite Library for white papers and case studies.
What’s next for Hootsuite?
The future of Hootsuite includes: development in mobile – push notifications, more support for teams, and making engagement with customers easier.
What’s your opinion? Share your thoughts below in the comments section.
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