HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard

Thanks to all those who provided us with feedback! We’re very excited to share these new features with everyone.

We’ve added direct messaging. Now you can direct messages from your dashboard, that means:
- you can now DM someone from within the feeds on HootSuite
- there’s a DM tab in profile view
- you can view Inbox / Sent DMs

Do you re-tweet? (For those not in the know, that’s when you love what someone has tweeted, and want to repeat it.) We’ve added a re-tweet functionality. You can now RT with a single click.

It’s now possible to check who’s following you, and follow people right from your HootSuite feed.

We’ve also added a shiny new search tab. Custom searches can be viewed and saved for each of your twitter profiles. If you follow keywords, use hash tags, or ever search twitter, this feature is for you.

Other changes and improvements include:

- Notification of any failed tweets due to communication issues with Twitter
- All Twitter feeds are loaded via AJAX to improve HootSuite performance
- Some more general performance and layout improvements. For instance, the ‘Sent’ tab is now selected by default on dashboard profiles, so you can see what you tweeted last

Hoot!

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Posted by Jenn Lowther

Twitter is an immensely useful tool for both personal and professional communication and interaction. Its been fascinating watching the growth of twitter over the past year and seeing the many ways that both people and businesses have begun utilize it. One of the best ways that twitter has been adopted – from a business point of view – is as a tool for customer service.

Twitter, by its very nature, is a digital soap box for people to talk about what’s important to them at any moment of the day. It’s the ideal platform to use when you are happy or upset with a company to voice your pleasure or vent your frustration. Thanks to swift organic growth and the underlying transparency and simplicity of the system, Twitter has become an ideal tool to use for customer service.

Twitter allows you to track what your customers are saying about your brand in real time – no other medium gives you such immediate and unfiltered response from people who are using your product or service. This represents a perfect opportunity for companies to interject into these conversations and either cement the positive brand experience or to rectify any issues that were encountered.

When we launched HootSuite, we actively used twitter as one of our main avenues to hear what our users were saying and how they were using HootSuite. By using twitter, we were able to follow what people were saying about our service, deal with any issues that cropped up surrounding our launch, update people as to the status of new features, and actively engage in conversations with people that were interested in our product. This allowed us to get a real time feel of how our users were using HootSuite and what features they wanted to see implemented. We took this information and included it into our development process, allowing us to give our users a product that they really wanted to use. We’re not alone in using twitter for this purpose, the following are companies currently using twitter for customer service:

Southwest Airlines

Dell Computers

Comcast

Starbucks

Jet Blue

Home Depot

Whole Foods

H&R Block

Zappos

Kodak

General Motors

Pandora

To augment the above list of large companies that use twitter for customer service, we put a quick call out on twitter to see who else is using twitter and the following companies/organizations responded:

Your Sole (Orthopedic Insoles)

Paper Check (Essay Editing and Proofreading Services)

I Can Has Cheezeburger

Fail Blog

Engrish Funny

Schipul Marketing

Richland College

Telstra BigPond (Australian ISP)

Newspaper Direct

Perkler (Online Community for Loyalty and Rewards)

Nashville Lifestyles/The Tennessean

US Air Force

Zhiing (Social Navigation Application for Smartphones)

Filthy Farm Girl (Sells soap)

Twitter for business, customer service, social media customer service, social media, Twitter

by Kate LeGresley

A flagging economy means sales. Take advantage! Now more than ever people should be saving money whenever they can. There’s always a good feeling that comes with purchasing a gorgeous new outfit at half price, or saving big bucks on a brand new television.

Here is a list of people to follow for money-saving promotions, coupons and advice. By following these bargain-savvy tweeple, you could save, uh, millions. Or at least a few pennies.

The list below represents twitter accounts dedicated to saving you money. A few of the profiles are by moms saving money on food and baby supplies. Plus a few digital bargain hunters. We’ve used Twittergrader.com to give the profiles a rating out of 100. Let us know if you have any to add!

A few insights to consider:
Bargainista – One of my favorites because she tweeted about the Apple one day sale, and Holts. Plus she’s in Canada.
5DollarDinners – Has some great tips and ideas for making $5 dinners.

Twitter for business bargains, shopping, Twitter

Additions / fixes for current release (beta v1.8):

• Added a “Feed” tab, which displays all of your incoming tweets
• Added “@Replies” tab to view all of your @replies
• Added the ability to reply to incoming tweets
• When creating a new tweet: Send “Now” is selected by default, and Send “Later” is pre-populated with the current date/time+15mins
• Additional time zones. We now have: Europe, Americas (North and South), Africa, Asia, Australia, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Antarctica
• Fixed an issue where following @HootSuite auto-enabled device updates
• Fixed an issue where some scheduled tweets were not sent out
• Fixed minor issues with character counter
• Updated the date picker
• Improved integration with ow.ly
• Creating a new tweet: “Add Link” now says “Shrink It”
• Identified which fields are required for signup process
• Minor bug fixes and performance improvements

Enjoy!

More great features on the way, including custom feeds, DM’s and more detailed stats!

Thanks to everyone for your feedback.

h00t!

hootsuite news

by Kate LeGresley

It’s been a week since HootSuite launched. Since then, more than 1000 accounts have been created, and more than 1500 followers have joined us on Twitter. We’ve had a great review from Mashable (which you can Digg here), as well as from Killerstartups and some other wonderful blogs.

One of the best things about this week has been communicating with all our new users. We’re really excited to see that a whole host of folks have begun to post their tweets using HootSuite. Here’s a list of some of our new friends. It ranges from big names to no names, from Vancouver to Germany.

Guy Kawasaki – http://twitter.com/guykawasaki
Guy is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine, and the author of nine books. With 33,431 followers at the time of this post, our favourite thought leader, Guy Kawasaki is a massively influential tweeter.

Georgia Straight, Vancouver – http://twitter.com/georgiastraight
The Georgia Straight has been the go-to lifestyle and entertainment weekly in Vancouver for more than 41 years. They have a per issue readership of almost 340,000.

Chris Breikss, Vancouver – http://twitter.com/chrisbreikss
Local Vancouverite, Chris Breikss is the president of 6S Marketing, a Vancouver based Internet marketing company. He’s also responsible for Ideas on Tap, a fantastic event well-attended by many local tweeple.

Foreign Office, UK – http://twitter.com/foreignoffice
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the United Kingdom is on Twitter! (And using HootSuite no less). Their offices provide information on all key roles, from supporting British nationals overseas to promoting British business to ‘legalising’ documents. (That’s the British spelling of ‘legalizing.’)

InStyle.com, USA – http://twitter.com/instyledotcom
InStyle magazine is a monthly women’s fashion publication that was launched in 1991. It has one of the largest circulations of magazines under its category. InStyle uses HootSuite to tweet out promos, articles, photos, and more.

Artists House Music – http://twitter.com/Artistshouse
Artsists House Music’s main goal is helping musicians and music entrepreneurs create sustainable careers. We’ve noticed many music sites sign up for HootSuite. We think this is a perfect use for the service, and are glad the organizations feel the same.

Myxer Tones, Florida – http://twitter.com/MyxerTones
Myxer Tones uses Twitter for business to promote free ringtones through tweets.

Radio 360talk – http://twitter.com/radio360

We’ve also made some friends from around the globe!

Linden Mueller, Giessen Germany – http://twitter.com/xgravity23
Sistory, Atlanta – http://twitter.com/Sistory (They love us, so we love them back.)
Hide Your Arms, Heathrow England – http://twitter.com/hideyourarms
Absara, Toulouse – http://twitter.com/absara

Thank you to all of you! Tweet on.

hootsuite news happy happy joy joy, new users, thank you