Laubach Literacy Ontario: Updating Twitter and Facebook accounts with one click
If you use more than one social media tool at your organization, such as Facebook and Twitter, consider using HootSuite, a free tool that allows you to post your message to multiple social media accounts at the same time. You choose the ones to which you want to post.
It saves you a lot of time!
Before I was introduced to HootSuite, I did a lot of copying and pasting to get the same message out on both of Laubach Literacy Ontario’s (LLO) social media accounts – Twitter and Facebook. Not anymore!
With HootSuite’s unique social media dashboard, I can schedule and publish to various sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, at the same time. It helps me spread messages, monitor conversations and track results – all from one simple dashboard. You can also upload files and images.
You can “retweet” posts from other organizations, and with one click of a button, you can choose to have them displayed on both your Twitter and your Facebook pages.
Explore the HootSuite: A great tool to quickly update and manage your social media tools article in AlphaPlus's Featured Technology section to learn more about it.
Another feature I like is that if you want to share a website article, and the website address is very long, you can insert the URL into a box and HootSuite will “shrink” it. That’s a pretty useful tool when you are limited to 140 characters in a Twitter message.
For example, the image of our Twitter post below shows a shortened link "http://ow.ly/4E5lk" which, if not reduced in size, would have been this long: http://www.laubach-on.ca/getinvolved/facts/news/spring-edition-expressions-available
I plan to use HootSuite to update our followers on our Celebration 2011 Conference schedule, events and workshops, using #LLOConference2011 as well as the #literacy hashtags.
A hashtag is simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic. For example, if you search on #literacy, you’ll get a list of posts/tweets related to literacy.
LLO used #Literacy_Awareness_Day as a hashtag, which made it easier for others to find information on Literacy Awareness Day.
One of my messages about the upcoming conference has already been retweeted by Frontier College and by Oakville Literacy Council, so all of their followers have now received my original message and can pass this information forward to others.
Try HootSuite; it's a real “hoot”!
Lana Faessler is the Executive Director of Laubach Literacy Ontario, an organization that represents a network of community-based literacy programs that use the services of trained volunteer tutors and trainers.
Through Laubach-affiliated programs, tutors provide one-to-one and small group instruction for more than 3,500 adult students. These students want to upgrade their reading, writing and math skills. In addition, they want to upgrade their essential skills and other skills that relate to their goals.
