“Hootsuite for Government”

Group blog post written by Mahmut Selim Guler, Ashok Kumar Nakra, Rajneesh Tinga, Kazbek Abraliev, Hye Ryong Yu, Devesh Singh.

In this blogpost, our group of six participants of social media class sharing the insights and lessons learned from the presentation of Dr. William Ward, Hootsuite's Director Strategy and Social Media (SM) adjunct professor of SI Newhouse School of Communication at Syracuse University. In his presentation “Hootsuite for Government” he highlighted the importance of alignment of social media throughout the organisational mission and its strategic goals, and presented main functions of Hootsuite social media management dashboard tool as well.

Hootsuite with 11 million users around the world is one of leading social media management tool. Its dashboard allows users to follow and check all posts and multiple social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and many others, in one place. In addition, users can access their Google Drive on Hootsuite dashboard. Individuals, private and public organizations and nonprofits can manage their engagement in social media easily and effectively through Hootsuite’s free, pro or premium version. New users can easily sign in Hootsuite by using their Twitter, Facebook, Google accounts or by just creating a new account.

 

Strategic management. Organizations should not only pay attention to tools and technology but also must have strategy objectives, right mindset and skillset of the employees. Professor Ward points out that the organization applying social media should not look only above iceberg but should see the bigger picture lying below as well. In this regard, he defines Hootsuite as something more than just a social media management tool. Therefore, it is crucial to educate and train the social media staffs and empower them, so they may use the media in the right direction.

SM Maturity Matrix. The organization should formulate a social media maturity matrix consisting of eight parameters, which are education, strategy, organizational leadership, governance and compliance, business adoption, technology adoption, information management, crisis management in the scale of 1-5. SM Maturity Matrix is a useful tool to assess organizational readiness for social media use. The organization should decide to go from its current situation on SM to the point defined in social media maturity matrix. Hootsuite contribution in this maturity models is to give executive insights, education and training, analytics, and Hootsuite’s functional dashboard tool.

Measurement. Hootsuite’s visual analytical reports provide information regarding the growth of followers, mentions, gender distribution of audiences, users’ most active social media tool, sources of social media traffic, etc.  With regard to public sector, Hootsuite’s metrics and measurement tools can be helpful to increase the efficiency of their content, to control the traffic of posts and to improve the interaction with the public on social media.

 Productivity and Efficiency. Prof. Ward mentions that it would be possible to contribute 1.3 trillion annually to the economy by improving communication and collaboration through SM, and to increase the productivity of employees by 20-25%. However, team members need to have the ability and freedom to use SM tools. In addition, culture shift is required within the organization to increase the usage of the SM tools but not merely to maximize the profit. Therefore, employees should be allowed to use the tool as per their capability, given training, and required skillset.

 Security and Collaboration. In response to a question raised by the group, Prof. Ward explained that public agencies that are reluctant to use social media due to security issues can set up different level of permission and approval system to review contents before publishing. Publishing functionality helps organizing editorial control within the team and provide space for collaboration with different team members. It allows approving who can post and which content can be posted. However, public organizations initially should train and educate their employee how and what to do well on social media rather than saying what they do not to do or limiting their engagement.