Question and Answer with social media maven Jackie Jordahl from Heinz Marketing
If you’re like most marketers, you are attempting to manage multiple social media channels. Plus, you are most likely using and/or trying a myriad of social marketing tools. Sometimes, the number of tools can be as overwhelming as multi-channel marketing itself! So, we turned to Jackie Jordahl, an expert with Heinz Marketing, one of the leading agencies in digital marketing.
Jackie is a big fan of Hootsuite, so we asked her some key questions to help you get started on your Hootsuite journey. Of course, the end goal with using Hootsuite, or any similar tool, is increasing your Twitter followers, deepening engagement, and driving stronger business results with your Twitter strategy and implementation.
Rival IQ: Why Hootsuite over other tools?
Jackie: We use a number of tools to optimize social strategy for our own company as well as for our clients, but in terms of social engagement, Hootsuite’s real-time dashboard takes the cake. I use it daily for customer projects to complete the following tasks:
- Listen and engage with influencers, prospects, and customers
- Generate curated content
- Gain insights into what topics are currently trending
Once I customized my Hootsuite dashboard, I was able to significantly reduce the amount of time I spent on social media. More specifically, I no longer had to individually search for content or locate specific influencers, because everything could be found in my dashboard.
Rival IQ: How do you set up and customize your Hootsuite deck?
Jackie: My dashboard is constantly being modified, but when I initially set up a Hootsuite deck, I start by defining the categories I want to be monitoring, which typically are:
- My followers
- People I’m following
- Industry influencers
- Top blogs
- Target prospects
- Customers
- Relevant keywords
Although you may already have a list of blogs, keywords, and influencers ready to load into Hootsuite, it’s always good to do a little extra research. For example, if I was targeting sales people, I might Google “top sales blogs in 2014” or “top salespeople in 2014”. I would then skim through to find people or blogs I believe would be good resources of valuable information for my followers.
A look into Jackie’s Hootsuite dashboard setup. Please click to enlarge.
Rival IQ: What is the best process to finding influencers to follow or engage with on Twitter?
Jackie: My go-to tool for discovering and engaging with influencers is Little Bird. The platform is a quick way to get my hands on hundreds of top influencers. Their user-friendly dashboard offers geographical information, ways to share and connect instantly, and export options that streamline the process of getting a new list from Little Bird into a format that’s useful for me. Researching applicable LinkedIn groups is another strategy, however it requires more effort than Little Bird.
Once I’ve curated a list of influencers, I also create a stream for each influencer under the “influencer tab” in my Hootsuite dashboard. With their tweets clearly displayed, I watch for opportunities to interact and engage with my targeted influencers, and ultimately work toward building a relationship with each of them.
Rival IQ: What does your morning social “routine” look like?
Jackie: The first thing I do in the morning is open up my Hootsuite deck. I’m looking for two things:
- engagement opportunities
- interesting content
For engagement opportunities, I go straight to the prospects, customers and influencers tabs in my custom deck. I skim through these streams looking for pain points and content/conversation themes, and paying attention to various events that are coming up or currently happening. All of these are openings for me to reach out and engage.
For content curation I peruse through the influencers, blog and keyword tabs I’ve added to my deck to see what people are posting and/or talking about. As I’m doing this, I’m simultaneously de-cluttering my dashboard by removing any streams that haven’t been offering valuable content or conversations.
Rival IQ: How long do you spend executing your social strategy on an average day?
Jackie: Not long, thanks to tools like Hootsuite and Buffer. Both tools streamline the engagement process and allow me to be effective without wasting too much time digging through the internet. Collectively, I spend between 30 to 45 minutes researching, evaluating, connecting and posting each day.
A big thanks to Jackie for taking the time to answer these questions. Hopefully these tips give you some insights into how you should be leveraging Hootsuite and setting up your dashboard. For information on how to engage and interact on Twitter, be sure to check back for part two of this interview next week!
