2 Million Reasons to Give a Hoot about HootSuite

"2 million! I don't have enough time to read a list of 2 million items!"

Don't worry. When I say "2 million reasons," I'm talking about the 2 million people who use HootSuite. The site recently reached the 2 million milestone and spread the joy with a blog post and this awesome infographic. Click on to the next page to see it.

How Can REALTORS® Use HootSuite?
I know what you're thinking, "Sure; it's really terrific that HootSuite is growing. But how is this relevant to me?" Well, I'll tell you.

Managing a professional social media presence can be exhausting. Anything you can do to simplify or streamline the process can be immensely valuable. That's why I decided to try HootSuite. I discovered that it offers a great way for me to centralize all of my social media networks.

It's easy to get started, as long as you're willing to navigate through 5 zillion pop-ups (hey, at least they weren't ads) granting permission from all your social accounts:

After I got myself all set-up here's what I discovered:

1. My favorite feature so far is that I don't have to visit Facebook, Twitter or any other social media sites (and thus ring up several dozen tabs on Firefox) if I want to view news and updates from my connections. I can see feeds from every source in one single place. That's super helpful for me as an easily-distracted multi-tasker. It should also be beneficial for agents who want to save time.

2. I also liked that I had the ability to post the same message to several sites. For example:

This could be a nice option for agents or brokers who want to announce exciting news from their business and want to send it quickly and consistently throughout the Web.

3. The "Hootlet" add-on is my new best friend. If I'm on a site I want to share, I click on the cute little owl icon on my toolbar, and a nifty pop-up allows me to create a post that will go out on as many of my social media accounts as I'd like. Best of all, HootSuite has its own URL shortening tool, thus long URLs are shortened automatically with Hootlet.

This is something I think agents and brokers can appreciate. If there's a site that announces events in your local community, or even a property details page from your own site, HootSuite can make sharing them with your followers easy. It only takes a few clicks.

4. I haven't had a chance to delve into the report-creation feature yet. So I can't really comment on the value there. I'll let you know once I've had the opportunity to try it out.

If you want even beefier features, you may want to consider the Pro version (for $5.99 per month). But, from what I've seen, the free version is perfectly sufficient.