HootSuite is a popular social media dashboard that allows you to take full control of your daily communications across social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a few others to mention.
HootSuite recently rolled out a brand new feature to their social dashboard. The new Publisher tools now allows you to schedule posts, tweets and messages across many social sites from one single interface. For me personally this tool is an exceptional feature for promoting affiliate links, product reviews as well as to schedule posts and articles at times when I’m simply not able to post them manually.
In today’s short tutorial we’re going to take a look just how simple it is to schedule posts and messages using the new publisher features.
If you’re not already using HootSuite you can signup for a free user account here. If you’re already a user sign in as you normally would.
The first step once you have logged into your dashboard is to click on the Publisher button in the left navigational menu which pops up when you hover your mouse over the paper aeroplane looking icon. This will take you to the publisher dashboard itself.
To begin scheduling your timely messages on Twitter and Facebook simply type in your message or tweet along with the URL in the message box. You can also copy tweets from the TweetMe pop-up box straight into this box. You might also want to use the shrink feature to shorten URL’s.
To schedule your message click on the small calendar icon beneath the message box to select the date and time you wish you message to be sent. You can then hit the done button or if you’re a premium subscriber to HootSuite you can schedule in bulk.
Once you’ve hit the done button, check the social profiles you wish to have your message sent to. The photo above suggests that I’m tweeting a post from my blog to appear on my Twitter and Facebook profiles. When you check the Facebook box, HootSuite will create a preview of how your message will appear on your Facebook profile. You can then make changes to the appearance if you wish to.
OK, when you’re done scheduling all your posts and messages, the list of tweets and their respected schedule time of release will be shown as above. You can view in list, day, week or month.
By clicking on the past schedule button in the left hand navigational menu under publisher you can view your past scheduled posts and messages as shown above. Finally you can also edit or delete any tweet or message that you’ve scheduled by simply hovering your mouse over the right hand side of your list view page to bring up the edit and delete icons.
