When I was little, my parents bought me one of those three-wheel plastic tricycles called a “Big Wheel.” As I get bigger and mastered wheeling around my neighborhood, my parents upgraded me to a bicycle with training wheels. Boy, that was hard. My house was at the top of our street and it was quite the incline down the road. Other than circling around our short driveway, the only place to go was down the street. I won’t lie, I was scared. But my Dad helped me grow confident in the training wheels to keep from just falling over, and before too long, I was riding up and down the street with ease.
It didn’t take long for me to have the confidence to take those training wheels off. A bike without training wheels… wow, that was something. It meant freedom. It meant excitement. It meant I had just expanded my world by a factor of ten.
By middle school, I was going on long rides all over the county. By high school, I had formed a riding group and we were doing weekend ‘centuries’ with ease. But in the winters, in order to keep up with our training, we had to ride indoors.
Have you ever ridden a bike indoors? It’s just as hard as taking off those training wheels. Every Wednesday evening we’d meet at our local bike shop after hours and hangout while a couple of us rode on ‘rollers’ for periods of time. Rollers were simply three wide tubes, two in back and one in the front, on which you’d place and balance your bike and be able to ride it, stationary, for as long as you wanted.
Once I learned to ride my bike without training wheels, I never needed them again. I could ride for miles and miles and not even think about the bike. Once I learned to ride my bike on rollers, I could ride for as long as I wished and not even think about trying to balance the bike. My time on the bike became less about the bike and more about the experience. I was having a tremendous amount of fun with my friends, and meeting new people with similar interests.
That’s why I’ve written this book, The Unofficial Book On HootSuite. While you will love being able to refer to this book every time you want to learn how to do something new within the HootSuite Dashboard, the real benefit that you’ll achieve through the book is when you’ve taken these lessons to heart and learned how to use HootSuite so well, you don’t even have to think about it.
Rather than having to think about how to shorten a link and select a profile and schedule a post, you’ll focus more on what you’re saying and how it will impact your audience.
Rather than having to think about how to find interesting discussions, you’ll focus more on actually engaging in discussions with people on topics that you’re interested in.
Steve Jobs once said, “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”
I believe that HootSuite has provided a wonderful tool, one that many businesses can benefit from, and it’s my hope that through this book, I can help you do wonderful things with it.
Throughout the book, I mix instructions on how to use the HootSuite Dashboard, along with recommendations on how to use blogging and social media in general, for a strong Content Marketing strategy.
For instance, in the chapter on how to use HootSuite to curate and share content, we talk not about using the automatic RSS feed feature, but rather how to set up the Syndicator App so that you can bring in RSS feeds into one or more streams. With these streams in place, you can easily see the latest articles from your favorite sources and then choose which ones you want to share, to which social profiles, and at one time, to have the greatest impact on your audience.
Or in the chapter on how to use HootSuite for Social Listening, where I teach you how to create saved streams, but also recommend how you might use such feature to help your business by listening for key conversations taking place online, and watching for opportunities to jump in.
By the end of the book, you’ll understand that HootSuite is so much more than a tool for posting to multiple social networks. It’s a tool for managing your social presence.
So check out The Unofficial Book On HootSuite – The #1 Tool For Social Media Management. And be sure to pay close attention to the Daily Checklist I offer at the end. It will really help you focus your time and energy on tasks that are productive, and there’s a link there that you can use to download a PDF copy.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VkQqvWa9Sw
Available now on Amazon (kindle) and Barnes & Noble (nook).
For more information and resources on HootSuite, check out our HootSuite Resources section.