Owly HootSuite at Sociable! Launch Party by @jeremylim
While we hunker down at HootSuite HQ, we’re finding ways to help you spread messages, grow audience and track results. Many HootSuite users are mentoring, evangelizing and otherwise spreading the good word to colleagues, industries and social networks. Each example is a treat to find and share, though sometimes it takes us a couple days to gather them amidst a myriad of other tasks: helping solve problems and adding fresh features.
So, settle in for a few minutes with a tasty beverage for another HootSuite News Round-up:
Time and Sanity for Paralegals
Carole Bruno, a @ParalegalAuthor for over 35 years, writes: HootSuite is Many Steps Beyond TweetDeck:
Now that I’ve gotten TweetDeck down pat, along comes HootSuite! After some study, I was able to summarize it for my readers. In my opinion, it is much better than TweetDeck, because it is more organized and more like I think. I probably will continue to use TweetDeck too. I don’t know, but I wanted to summarize it for you.
Save your time and save your sanity. Continue managing all of your Twitter profiles through one client: HootSuite.
Saving time and sanity – that’s important to everyone!
Managing Efforts Easily
Next, @jeremyawilliams shows how to Manage Your Social Media Efforts with Hootsuite:
If you’ve already created a Twitter account, a Facebook fanpage and a Wordpress blog for your organization, you’re on the right track. Now that you have accounts at a handful of social media sites, how do you manage them all?
There are dozens of social media management platforms out there, including some great ones like TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both are great applications, but they need to be installed on your computer. One of the many great things about Hootsuite is it’s 100% web-based. You simply visit Hootsuite.com, log in and you can manage your social media initiatives from any computer with an internet connection…
I’ve been using Hootsuite as my primary social media management tool for the past several months and I’ve been extremely impressed. There is a Hootsuite App available for iPhone and I’m waiting for the Blackberry app that will hopefully follow. Have you used Hootsuite?
Thanks for the input on a Blackberry App, Jeremy. People can vote up the Blackberry feature request at HootSuite’s support site.
Making Twitter Simpler
Allan Hoffman, a guest columnist for the Star-Ledger, contributes Lost in the Twitterverse?
You would think Twitter would be the ultimate in simplicity. After all, the service is famous for limiting posts to 140 characters, typically just a sentence (or a fragment of one). You type your message, press the “update” button, and that’s that. But is Twitter as simple as that? Not really. …
If you had any doubts about Twitter’s use by business, a tour of HootSuite will settle the issue.
Thanks, Allan! We try to make life simpler so people can concentrate on the benefits of using the social web. Plus, Twitter does becomes more enjoyable with trend tracking and conversation monitoring.
2010: A Social Odyssey
Sam Brace added his thoughts about coming trends in 2010: The year social media comes of age for businesses for Inside Tucson Business:
Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, LinkedIn. Where are these social media platforms taking us? Will there come a day when information is beamed directly into the cortex of our desired audience? While that seems unlikely, so did the concept of a social networking site like Facebook 10 years ago…
So how are marketers measuring social media investments? Third-party Twitter applications, such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, are free and can show how many people clicked on content in tweets. Facebook has a free program on its business pages called Insight that can determine similar values. Other sources are available, too.
This will prove to be an exciting year for social media and the professionals who strategically use these sites to build brand awareness and relationships. The new developments in the medium are sure to come. Adapting to the times and looking forward is virtually certain to be the most effective trend for any perceptive professional.
I agree, Sam. What used to be divided into “social media” and “traditional media” or “social marketing” and “advertising” will now be just “media” and “marketing” as the tools mold to fit the needs of business.
Scheduling for the World Market
Gideon Nieuwoudt reviews HootSuite on iafrica.com with tips and recommendations for his audience:
With social networking sites growing in popularity, but also in the way companies have begun to utilise it to talk to their customers, it’s becoming more and more important to get a proper tool to connect to the social network of your choice. To get the most out of one of these, Twitter, relies on getting the information you want to share out there as quickly as possible, while also having the information shared by those you follow available to you with ease.
In the last few years since Twitter’s release, a number of software packages have sprung up that does this, but none of them really works as well as the website HootSuite.
At the centre of HootSuite’s appeal is its clean, simple interface — it’s just easier to do what you want, when you want it (you can schedule your tweets to go out at a certain time, which is brilliant when you want to target an announcement to an audience that’s situated in a different time zone).
You can also access other social networking sites through it, like Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm and even WordPress.
Gideon has a great point about different time zones. When speaking to a global audience, communicating to them at an ideal time is key.
Mayo’s Social Teamwork
Meanwhile in Ireland, The Mayo News shares a great HootSuite review in “A Site in my Sights” column. Here are some key points:
Benefits
Hootsuite allows multiple users to easily manage multiple social networking accounts. It has the added benefit of a basic (if inconsistent) analytics package for your short URLs. It copes well with Twitter lists and Facebook pages and can save Tweets and send them later at a prescheduled time. It’s perfect for corporate social networking – for example nine of us use it in The Mayo News for our five (so far) Twitter accounts and Facebook page. It can also be used for LinkedIn, Ping.fm and Wordpress. For those nasty corporations who want to prevent their staff from accessing Twitter and Facebook, Hootsuite allows monitoring and updating without accessing the actual websites, enabling the (short-sighted) blocking of the sites themselves (boo!).
Is it any good?
Yes, with the caveats above, Hootsuite is great. Its integration is extremely convenient and the iPhone app is extremely handy. Recommended. FK
Thanks for sharing an example on how to use HootSuite as a team. The admin/editor set-up takes a few minutes to organize but saves time, hassle, and provides better workflow tracking.
Coming Next
Tune in next week for the next news roud-up. In the meantime, keep the Hoots coming and we’ll keep sharing.
News Roundup
africa, arizona, business, HootSuite, hootsuite for business, hootsuite reviews, ireland, new jersey, news, reviews
After weeks of diligent preparation, it’s a treat to pause and explore the reaction to the new version before hunkering down to prepare for the next release.
