This is part 5 of our free marketing basics guide. Social media can be a quick and easy way to market your counselling business and also demonstrate your experience and knowledge.

The Twitter website interface can be confusing and it’s easy to miss when people mention you and reply to your Tweets. Not responding to messages can be worse than not having social media.

It can be time consuming logging in to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram separately and also tempting to spend too long browsing the home feed when you log into these social networks. Unless you’ve got time to spare, social media can be a big time sink.

Benefits of using Hootsuite

We recommend you use a web application called Hootsuite instead of posting from individual social media websites or apps. It’s free for up to three social media accounts (scroll down a bit to see the free plan link) and makes managing your social networks easier and quicker. When logged in to the Hootsuite app, you see a tab for each social network with ‘streams’ in each tab like your home feed, replies and direct messages. Hootsuite can manage Twitter, Facebook and Instagram profiles, LinkedIn pages and profiles and Google+ pages.

Once your networks are setup, you can post to all of them at once with one click.

Replying to Tweets and direct messages is also easier in Hootsuite, so you won’t miss any messages from people who could turn into new clients.

You can also set up a hashtag or keyword search to give you ideas for new posts on your own profiles.

Scheduling Social Media Posts

Hootsuite also allows you to add scheduled posts to each social network that will be posted in the future. You can prepare a number of messages once a week and schedule them to appear across the coming weeks or months. This further reduces the time spent logging in to each social network, checking your feeds and possibly getting distracted!

Summary

We’ve described how you can manage your social media accounts more easily and quickly with the free web app Hootsuite. I hope this article has been useful and saves you some time managing your social profiles.

Check out the rest of our free marketing basics guide to help promote your counsellor website.