HootSuite is a popular social media management tool that allows users to update and post any pages or profiles for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, Myspace, WordPress. Mixi and others from one place - the HootSuite dashboard. When you sign up, you are essentially given a dashboard with tabs organizing all the social profiles you connect to HootSuite.

The company operates on a freemium model and has over 9 million users in more than 175 countries.

Why Use HootSuite?

Users can implement and analyze marketing campaigns across all social profiles without needing to sign in to each social network individually. For premium accounts, users get advanced features for social analytics, audience engagement, team collaboration and security.

Although HootSuite is largely known as a business tool, a lot of individuals use it too. If you spend a lot of time on social media and have a lot of profiles to take care of, streamlining all of those profiles into one simple system can help save you a lot of time.

If you're posting the same thing across five profiles, you can post it once through HootSuite and select the profiles where you want it published, and it will publish it on all five profiles at once. Using HootSuite takes a bit of time to get familiar with, but in the end it improves productivity and leaves with more time for more important things.

HootSuite Feature Breakdown

You can do a lot with HootSuite, but here's a general breakdown of some of the most useful features that come with signing up. Please note that premium users will gain more features and functionality than those that have a free account.

Post directly to social profiles: The most prominent feature is the ability to post text, links, photos, videos and other media directly to your social profiles through the HootSuite dashboard.

Scheduled posting: No time to post throughout the day? Schedule those posts so that they're automatically posted at specific times.

Multiple profile management: With a free account, you can manage up to five social profiles with HootSuite. With a Pro account, you can manage an unlimited number of social profiles. So if you've gone 20 Twitter profiles and 15 Facebook pages to update, HootSuite can handle it!

Social content apps for additional profiles: HootSuite has a suite of social apps for other popular social networking sites not included in its key offerings, such as YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr and others.

Targeted messaging: Send private messages out to targeted audience groups on selected social profiles straight through the HootSuite dashboard.

Organization assignments: If you work with a team, you can create an "organization" to improve communication and collaboration across everyone's HootSuite account.

Analytics: HootSuite has a dedicated section for creating analytical reports, click summaries. It works with both Google Analytics as well as Facebook Insights.

Getting Started with HootSuite

I'd recommend signing up for a free account first with HootSuite since the free version already comes with a lot of features to get started. If you're serious about social media management and analytics, you can get a 30-day free trial of HootSuite Pro, which costs about $10 a month after that. There's also an option for those that need to go really big with an enterprise plan.

Sign Up With HootSuite