Based on our last Freesource post on Hootsuite and how much we love using them as a social media management platform and tool, today’s quick insider post will be 6 reasons why you need to use a social media management tool for your pet store’s marketing strategy. If you missed those items, we can deliver them straight to your inbox (every other week, that’s all!) when you join our free community for pet store owners! Check it out.

Let’s dive right in - you’ll notice that most of these reasons fall under a few main tenets: it saves you time, it makes your life easier, and it improves your social media marketing capabilities.

8 Reasons To Use Social Media Management

Managing Multiple Platforms

Having a singular system to post content from is WAY BETTER than having to jump between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, or whatever else your pet business may be using as part of it’s online marketing strategy. Using a social media management tool streamlines the posting process by removing the need to shift between platforms. Plan everything in one place to get the messages straight, then post all at once, or tweak and send as needed.

Social media management tools combine several platforms into one easy place.

A quick personal example: Prior to our days playing in the dog park with Hootsuite, our process for posting content went as follows.

Post or schedule content to Facebook
Send content via Google Drive to smartphone
Download content from the Google Drive app to photos or videos on a smartphone
Load content and create a post on Instagram, then save it to drafts.
Wait until the day we wanted to post the content, then go into Instagram drafts, and post it.

See where this is going? Lots of little things to remember, lots of tedious and time-consuming steps, and overall broken workflow. All fixed with a social media management platform like Hootsuite.

Engage with your Audience

At Pet Engine Marketing, we work with a number of clients who have had a pain point in the past of missing comments or questions that are posted as responses on their social media. To some extent, social media is sort of a “set it and forget it” type of task when it’s not your primary concern or job. That makes it easy to miss inboxed questions, engagement, and more. At Pet Engine Marketing, listening and responding, and managing is our job, so those clients don’t have to worry about that anymore! If that sounds like you, give us a call!

Contact

Social media's made it easier than ever for customers to reach out to brands they want to interact with. Whether it's asking questions, singing praises, or voicing constructive criticism, customers now have a direct channel for giving brands their feedback, and they're taking full advantage. According to the customer service software company Zendesk, nearly 40% of customers already use social media for customer service. Not only that but 42% of customers who reach out to brands on social expect a response in under 60 minutes. Has your pet store been responsible or negligent when it comes to your online inboxes?

Analytics and ROI

In a metrics-obsessed world, everyone is expected to prove the return on investment of every activity. The ability to measure and analyze results is vital. Each social network provides some tools to assist with activity analysis, but obtaining a holistic view of a multi-platform campaign can be a major headache. Data needs to be exported from each platform before being collated and analyzed in a spreadsheet or similar.

A social media management tool makes the process much simpler by accessing the relevant information directly. This approach streamlines analysis and helps to avoid the common mistakes that can skew your figures when exporting and importing multiple data sets. Pet stores can benefit from having all of this information in one place, saving time and providing a 30,000-foot view of your online marketing as a whole.

Audience Listening

With Hootsuite’s ability to tap into relevant streams and feed you content that is likely to resonate with your audience, pet store owners get the advantage of not only learning more about what their audience likes but by getting easy content that is sure to get engagement and help build a robust and active online community.

You can also monitor and learn from areas that are outside your direct sphere of influence by keeping an eye on brand mentions that don’t tag your business, brand-adjacent keywords, and even local competitors for conquering and growth opportunities. Hootsuite streams aggregate all of this stuff into one place.

Stay Organized with a Calendar

Social media management tools give you the ability to think through your posting strategy and time your content accordingly. Plan months in advance and free up some of your time to continue engaging with your pet store’s customers. Get organized regarding your pet store’s business and marketing goals, creating a unified content strategy across several platforms. Having a neatly filled-out calendar is a stress destroyer.

Get Mobile

Social media management platforms typically have mobile apps that make posting and scheduling content, to multiple platforms at a time, extremely efficient and easy. We know that as a pet store owner you can’t just sit on your social platforms or in front of your computer 24/7. You’ve got a store to run! But when that cute puppy comes in and it has to go on Facebook and Instagram, you can save half the time by just posting it through your management tool!

Conclusion

So, there you have it. 6 reasons to use a social media management platform like Hootsuite. Not a ton of empirical data in this, but we hope you’ll take our word for it when we talk about our experience switching to a management tool and saving us time, energy, effort, and headaches. It can do the same for you and your pet store!