HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard

With the fresh release of HootSuite (code-named Barn Owl), we’ve also revamped the ways we offer knowledge and help. Now there are three ways to feedback, connect or get help – here’s the breakdown:

HootSuite Feedback: A Place for Ideas

Most comments from HootSuite users are about feature requests, road map (and how lovable owls are). This is why we’ve created HootSuite Feedback — a special place for fans of our beloved social media dashboard. Submit feature requests, talk with fellow users, and speculate about the future.

More than just a forum, HootSuite Feedback is a place where you can vote on features, suggestions, and miscellaneous discussions. Similar to Digg, there is a button beside each topic that our fans can “vote up”. If we see an idea that is particularly popular, don’t be surprised if we include it in future versions.

So grab a coffee, start sharing ideas — and remember: we’re listening.

HootSuite Help: Lending a Hand

We’ve streamlined HootSuite Help services to better serve you. We’ve re-created our help pages to resolve your issues quicker. HootSuite Help’s emphasis is on indexing easy-to-find answers to most of your questions.

As a result, we encourage you to help yourself. HootSuite is a free service and we are gaining more users. Hence, it is not always easy to answer every email in a timely fashion. Before creating a service request, be sure to check our newly created base of knowledge to see if there’s a solution to your problems.

Still, we acknowledge not every issue is documented, so please send us a Support Request if there is no article addressing your problem. Our Help Team is always happy to help you!

HootSuite Engage: Let’s Hang

HootSuite keeps adding more social networks to the social media dashboard and we hang out there too. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and MySpace. With our presence on these channels, we often love to chat and connect. Hence, HootSuite Engage – our new initiative to well… engage with you. Post on our walls, share your thoughts, and  get to know us. Wherever you may be, we want you to know you got a friend with HootSuite.

With that said, all feedback, suggestions, and feature requests posted on social networks will now be directed to HootSuite Feedback. Likewise, support questions will be directed to HootSuite Help.

Thoughts on Support: We’re in This Together

Owly HootSuite poses at Socialable book launch - photo Jeremy Lim

HootSuite is nothing without a great product and a passionate group of users. With this in mind, we work hard to continually improve the product while also making sure we help people get started, learn more tricks, and figure out problems. Like other companies, the questions we hear the most are ones we try to pro-actively answer.

To make this convenient for you, we’ve assembled a library of how-tos and FAQs which will solve 90% of inquires we hear through all support channels. The rest may require further help, but now there’s a full-functional support request system to better help you.

Additionally, there is a cadre of consultants, evangelists and savvy users who write tips, tricks and tutorials on their blogs. We’ll do our best to share those with others as well as producing White Papers and Case Studies to help artists, businesses and organizations learn how to Hoot more effectively.

We want everyone to enjoy their HootSuite experience — and  we work diligently to make this happen — thanks for coming along.

Support, customer service barn owl, connect, feedback, help, Support

Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, announced the finalization of $1.9 million USD of venture financing. The announcement comes on the heels of two significant releases including a HootSuite version for Apple iPhone and an update adding WordPress to the supported publishing platforms which already include Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and of course, Twitter.

The financing came from a high profile syndicate including Hearst Interactive Media, Blumberg Capital and prominent angel investors Social Concepts, and Geoff Entress.

CEO Ryan Holmes says, “This funding keeps HootSuite on track towards becoming the ultimate social media dashboard. We look forward to reaching wider audiences, and helping all manner of on-line projects and personalities communicate better with their audiences.”

HootSuite was created by Invoke Media in November of 2008 as a Twitter solution for its social media department and quickly evolved to provide brand monitoring, file-sharing, and social network integration. After only one year on the market, HootSuite has built a reputation as an essential tool for new marketers and consumers. Our more than 300,000 users include Whitehouse.gov, Disney, Time, Martha Stewart Media and SXSW.

customer service, features, hootsuite news, update dashboard, development, financing, news, pr, ryan holmes, venture capital

Add some punch to your social media experience by integrating WordPress with HootSuite. It’s simple and hassle-free. Like an uppercut, HootSuite makes blogging that much more powerful.

Watch the tutorial video above and see why owls are the Bruce Lee of the bird world.

Initial support is for blogs hosted on WordPress.com, but support for self-hosted WordPress blogs is on the horizon.

UPDATE: We’ve had a number of users report that when they try to add their WordPress.com account into HootSuite it pulls back the wrong blog name and avatar. The cause for this has been identified and WordPress has resolved the issue for us. In case anyone is concerned, there was no way for users to post messages to the wrong blog, it was only an issue with the returned display name and avatar. Everything should be working fine now.

If you have further questions about WordPress integration with HootSuite, please visit us at http://feedback.hootsuite.com

Support, customer service, social media blogging, social networks, tutorial, video, wordpress

We’ve added new features, and we think you’ll like them. Some features were the result of your requests. Others were added because they’re just darn cool.

Twitter Lists

Many of you have been asking HootSuite to implement Twitter lists, and we’ve been listening. Not only can you import the lists you’ve already created, you can create your own lists using HootSuite. These lists can be be saved as a column. You can further modify your lists (and who’s on them) using your column preferences.

Facebook and LinkedIn

We’ve decided to push HootSuite functionality beyond Twitter. You can now integrate your Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Whereas before you could update Facebook and LinkedIn through Ping.fm functionality, things are different now. Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are treated similarly to Twitter accounts: you can create columns from these social networks, read your friends’ status updates, and update multiple Facebook accounts. Facebook integration offers in-line commenting.

Scheduled Facebook and Linkedin Status Updates

If you are a regular HootSuite user, you’ve probably tried scheduling your tweets. We’ve extended this capability further: HootSuite users can now schedule their status updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ping.fm. The ability to schedule Ping.fm updates is particularly noteworthy since through it you can update most popular social networks (such as MySpace, LiveJournal, etc.) Scheduling status updates now has near universal applicability.

For help with using HootSuite, please visit our customer service area at http://feedback.hootsuite.com

customer service, features, hootsuite news, update Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Online Communities, ping.fm, Social network, Twitter

HootSuite now integrates with Toucan, the official Twitter application for Salesforce CRM.

HootSuite users can now import all their profiles into Toucan, thereby fusing the powerful features both platforms offer. With Toucan and HootSuite, you can generate leads and contacts from Twitter followers, communicate with sales prospects via Twitter, and respond to Salesforce support cases through tweets. Together, Toucan and HootSuite users will also have access to advanced statistics from the ow.ly URL shortener thereby delivering quantifiable return on investment (ROI) for social networks integrated within Salesforce.

This union proves that birds of a feather really do flock together. Ca-caw.

You can read more about the merry union here.

Twitter for business, customer service, hootsuite news HootSuite, Salesforce, Toucan, Twitter CRM, Twitter for business

Also, a reminder: If you’re not one of the thousands that has already done so, you’re still invited to tweet for an optional early upgrade to Hootsuite 2.0. Soon, we’ll be opening Hootsuite 2.0 to everyone, with no upgrade tweet required. The choice is yours: tweet your love, and get all the features of HootSuite 2.0 today, or wait a little bit and get them later.

Finally, thanks to everyone who has taken the time to check out HootSuite 2.0 and provide us with your thoughts and ideas. Here’s one of our favourites.

Moni
Team HootSuite

Twitter, customer service, features, hootsuite news, social media, update 2.0, columns, dos, groups, HootSuite, search, Twitter, upgrade

HootSuite will be updated this evening. The new release includes some new features, and improvements upon the issues reported by some users.

(Please note that the site may be down from 10pm to 12am PST. Fear not! Your prescheduled tweets will still go out during this time.)

New features:

1) Home and @Reply tabs will show “in reply to” links that let you see the tweet being responded to.

2) We’ve added text to the RSS feed settings page to help clarify whether a feed is paused or “feeding.”

3) On the search page, any search you make is automatically saved — no more extra clicks to save your favorite searches to HootSuite!

Improvements:

1) We’ve enhanced our server so using ow.ly should become more efficient and faster.

2) We’ve updated RSS feeds. This should eliminate the problems some have experienced and keep things running smoothly.

3) We’ve updated our click tracker to do a better job of filtering out bot and spiders from your clickthrough stats. This may have the side effect of making your previous stats suddenly shrink as we remove known bots from the database.

4) Clicking on @username within a tweet will now show you recent tweets from that user, rather than starting an @reply tweet.

5) We’ve made mouse-overs on Home/@Reply/DM page more consistent.

6) We’ve solved some of those pesky IE6 bugs.

Thanks for your feedback, everyone.

customer service click tracker, feedback, ow.ly, rss, update

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