How to use HootSuite for PR and online marketing

Its dashboard can streamline the way you use Twitter—from scheduling tweets to monitoring brand mentions, even helping you identify journalists who’d genuinely love to hear from you.

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A common challenge my clients face in social media marketing is a lack of time and focus.

Hootsuite can help. You can get more out of Twitter through streams and custom searches, all available in Hootsuite’s free version.

By setting up streams within your Hootsuite dashboard, you can filter the mass of information on Twitter and get what you need quickly.

Several streams should be standard: the home stream (pulls the Twitter home feed), mentions stream (every time someone mentions your Twitter handle), messages inbox stream (to show DMs) and the retweets stream (shows your tweets retweeted).

Custom streams enable you to monitor what people are saying about your brand when they don’t use your Twitter handle, to spot potential customers and engage in relevant conversations, and to use Twitter as a PR tool.

Employ the custom brand search stream.

People might talk about my agency, Impression, without writing @impressiontalk. I can still keep track of that chatter.

To set up a custom stream to monitor mentions of your brand, select “add stream” and choose “search” in the tabs at the top:


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