Get started with Hootsuite

Hootsuite can help you up your game on social. Whether you're looking to schedule and promote your social media content, increase brand awareness, engage with your audience, stay on top of brand mentions, or generate leads - you can do it all with Hootsuite. Once you're up and running, you can measure your results so you can make more strategic decisions every time you post.

Choose a plan

Hootsuite offers several plan options and add-ons to meet your needs. Consider the number of social accounts you want to manage, the average number of posts you'll publish, and whether you'll work with a team of people or by yourself. The plan you choose determines your allowances for these tasks. Higher-level plans offer access to more powerful features, such as approval workflows and automations. Learn more about our plan offerings.

For information on changing plan types or managing your subscription or payments, see Manage your Hootsuite plan and account.

Sign in to Hootsuite and visit your home page

You can sign up for a Hootsuite account with your email address or via your Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, or X account. Once you sign in to hootsuite.com, you can go to your Hootsuite home page to see what's new at Hootsuite, manage your drafts and connected accounts, check your progress, and more.

Connect your social accounts

The first time you sign in, Hootsuite prompts you to connect your social accounts and set permissions. The number of social accounts you can add depends on your plan type, but we recommend adding at least three. As an example, an Instagram account, a LinkedIn account, and a Facebook Page make up a total of three social accounts.

For detailed information and a short video about connecting social accounts, see Connect a social account to Hootsuite.

Create, schedule, and publish your content

You can create, schedule, and publish your social media content to Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Threads, TikTok, Pinterest, and YouTube from one place at the same time.

To get started, choose one of the following options:

• To create a brand new post, select Create from scratch.
• To create a post for the top used networks, select Post across networks.
• To find the most popular trending topics for inspiration, select Post about a trend.
• To create a post with the help of OwlyWriter AI, select Start with AI (see Hootsuite AI terms).

To get started, go to Create, and then select an option.

Select your social accounts, and then create your post. In addition to text, you can include mentions or tags, links, images, videos, GIFs, emoji, and hashtags.

As you compose your post, you can preview how it will look on the right. When you're ready, you can publish it, save it as a draft, or schedule it for later.

For more information, see:

• Create and publish posts
• Create engaging & effective social media content
• Use trending topics to draft a post
• Save and edit drafts
• Create and schedule content in a calendar

View and manage your scheduled posts in a calendar

To view or manage your scheduled content, go to Plan. You can create new posts and organize, edit, or delete existing posts in a helpful, calendar view.

• Select a day in the calendar to create new content to schedule and publish on that day.
• Review and manage your scheduled content in a list view, or a weekly or monthly calendar view.
• Work on draft posts from a list of all drafts, or view drafts with scheduled dates alongside your other scheduled content in the calendar.

Monitor feeds and engage with your audience

Hootsuite streams are feeds that display the content from your connected social accounts and let you take part in industry conversations. Use streams to monitor activity across all of your accounts; engage with your audience; and monitor keywords, topics, hashtags, brand mentions, and competitors in one place.

After you've connected your social accounts to Hootsuite, you can go to More, select Streams, and then select Add Stream to create a new stream. To organize or categorize your streams, add boards by selecting New board and choosing a stream type.

Create a few boards and streams and scroll through them to see what works best for you. You can easily create and delete streams, so don't be afraid to explore.

• To learn more about the experience of adding streams, see Your first boards and streams.
• To learn about using boards, see Organize your streams.

Here are a few other things you can do with streams:

• Share stream content
• Organize your streams
• Edit or delete published content in streams

Analyze your results

Discover which social networks work best for your brand as well as which types of posts grab attention, drive engagement, and grow your audience with Hootsuite Analytics. Review your top performing posts, find the best times to post, and compare your results over time. Want to get an idea of what you can do in Analytics reports? Go to Analytics, select Create a report, and then select Demo reports to view and work with sample data. Learn more about Analytics in Hootsuite.

If you leverage Lumen by Talkwalker for advanced social listening and additional analytics, you can open Lumen by Talkwalker right from Hootsuite. Go to More, and select Lumen by Talkwalker.

Next steps

Here are some great ways to get even more out of Hootsuite and advance your Hootsuite knowledge.

Extend your Hootsuite functionality with apps

Visit Hootsuite Apps to select from a library of free and third-party apps developed to increase your productivity with Hootsuite.

Go to More, and then select App directory to explore our apps.

For more information, see:

• Install or uninstall apps
• Popular apps and integrations

Manage social media on the go with Hootsuite mobile

Download Hootsuite’s iPhone or Android app to manage social media from anywhere. Draft, schedule, or publish posts right away and respond to messages or assign them to team members on the go. You can download the Hootsuite mobile app from the App or Play store or find links here.

Advance your skills with Hootsuite Academy

Master new social media skills and expand your Hootsuite knowledge with free online courses. Visit Hootsuite Academy to explore our courses and certification options.