Managing your social media with Zoho Social

So what is a social media management?

Social media management is the process of managing your online presence on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter by creating, publishing, and analysing content you post.

Why should I use a social media management tool?

Using social media management system or app such as: Hootsuite, Buffer or Zoho Social, can help you to organise your social media content across your social media platforms. You can add the content to all social media platforms by just creating one content post. The system will then post the content to all your platforms at a scheduled time of your choice. You can use this to plan a whole months regular content in one go, and still access the system to do ad-hoc posts that can go across all, or selected platforms.

As a small business we spend time making sure we communicate on our social media platforms. Whilst it is important to get the message out for people to see, it can be quite time consuming having to remember to post your content. It also takes time to post to each of your social media platforms. So the best way to manage your social media content is to use a social media management tool. We have used several in the past, but we have found that Zoho Social suits our business needs.

Here is our quick guide to using Zoho Social for your social media management:

Getting started

First you need to set up an account with Zoho, they offer a FREE 30 day trial, so you can see if it is the right platform for you to use for your business. If you find it works, you can then sign up to a package to suit your business. It is worth starting with the basic package as you get used to the features, you can pay for this monthly or get a reduced average monthly rate if you pay annually.

Once you have opened an account, you can then get started by setting up your brand. You can connect your different social media accounts, but you can only have one account per social media platform. Otherwise Zoho recognises this as a different brand. So if your business has two different Facebook pages, you might have to upgrade your account to have more than one brand.

Click on the type of social media platform you would like to link, and follow the instructions.

(Get started – zohosocial.com)

Creating a post

The easiest way to create a post is from the Calendar view. If you place your curser in the corner of the date, a pencil icon will appear for you to create a post.

Now you can see the social media platforms you have linked to the account, you can click to select or deselect the platforms if you don’t want to post this content to all of them.

Zoho will tell you if the post content is to big to post to Twitter or any other platform. So you could choose to create a slightly different post for Twitter and shorten the text and add more hashtags.

You can add images to the text and emoji’s in the left had corner. You can also choose to publish now, or schedule for another date or time. With the basic account you can create one post at a time, but choose to go back and duplicate the post. With one of the higher packages, you can choose to repeat a post, choosing the day of the week or date to repeat the post.

Once you have scheduled a post, you will be able to see it in the calendar view. This is a great way to review what and when you are posting, to make sure you are spreading your content out and not posting everything at once.

Once a post is published it disappears from the calendar, but you can click on published posts and review by each platform to see what has been posted.

If for any reason a post has not published, you will still be able to see it on the calendar view.

On the basic package, you will have Home, Posts and Reports visable in the top bar.

Home - gives you a view of your brand health and recent post activity.

Posts – this is where you can view and publish posts.

Reports – gives you an overview of the activity on each social media platform.

So that is a basic overview of the Zoho Social standard package, and how you can use it to schedule and monitor your social media activity.

With the upgraded professional version, you also have the ability to:

• Manage all your social media messages in one place.
• Repeat post scheduling.
• Bit.ly URL shortner.
• and much more.

If you need more help creating content for your social media posts, you can take a look at our blog ‘Simple graphic design with Canva’.

Or if you would like to know about how one of our team at First Rate PA could support you with creating, designing and scheduling your social media content. Get in contact via our contact form.