HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard

HootSuite has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve for managing RSS feeds. Here are a few things you may or may not know about feeding RSS with HootSuite:

Pause a Feed

We’ve made it possible to pause your feeds with HootSuite — with a click of a button. In the RSS/Atom section of your settings, simply press the pause button. Press play if you want it to resume. We’d like to think that the hardest thing about this is wrapping your mind around how easy it is.

Private Analytics

When you feed your RSS content into HootSuite, rest easy knowing the analytics are private. Your competition can’t peek at your numbers. Unlike other Twitter RSS services that depend on third parties for their URL analytics, HootSuite integrates both RSS and analytics in one app. This means better security for you (and less intel for competitors).

Multiple Accounts

We’ve saved the best tip for last. With HootSuite, multiple Twitter profiles can have access to one RSS feed. You can choose which accounts have access, and when they have it. One RSS feed can be configured to send to all your accounts, a few of them, or just one.

Here at HootSuite, we have tested many helpful ways to integrate RSS feeds with Twitter. However, we’re only scratching the surface. What tips do you have?

Twitter for business, features analytics, atom feed, columns, multiple accounts, rss, tips

HootSuite can schedule your tweets -- and make life easier

Few of us have the time to be on Twitter all the time. In this post, we explain how to make the most of a well-known HootSuite feature: scheduled tweets.

Improving visibility
If you send more tweets, your Twitter handle and your content become more more visible. Scheduling your content to come out at regular intervals during the day translates to improved visibility, and has the additional benefit of being less interruptive. Many business and power users have told us that scheduling content in advance allows them to focus on other Twitter experiences such as retweeting, sourcing new content streams or having conversations.

Sending time-sensitive tweets
Some tweets need to go out at specific times: announcements, promotions, and customer service responses. This is especially true when your target audience lives in a different time zone than you. In Los Angeles, if you’re starting your workday, someone in London is finishing theirs. With scheduled tweets, you’re able to ensure your followers are reached at the appropriate time.

Controlling content flow
Nobody likes to be inundated with a torrent of tweets. Many Twitter users have a lot to say but do not want to come across as spammy. Instead of sending 20 tweets in the span of 5 minutes, why not send 20 tweets over the course of 10 hours? By staggering your tweets, your messages reach the world in a more cohesive, less obtrusive manner.

Optimizing for traffic
If you know that your links are more likely to be clicked at a particular time, HootSuite lets you schedule accordingly, to maximize the penetration of your content. Public relations people or media workers familiar with Jack Shafer’s news cycle theory will see the benefit of this feature immediately.

These are all good reason to schedule your tweets. But everyone has their own reason for using this HootSuite feature. What is yours?

Twitter, Twitter for business, features content, features, HootSuite, optimization, schedule tweets, strategy, traffic, Twitter, visibility

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

Thanks to votes from many of you wonderful people, we won a Shorty Award for “best app” in January of this year. Now, the team behind the Shorty Awards has collated a comprehensive new research report about Twitter for business.

The Shorty Report provides the latest data through interviews with dozens of companies that are using Twitter to make a big impact with short messages.

Use the code “HOOTREPORT” at checkout to score 10% off this value-packed information package, and get an edge on the competition.

Here are some teaser quotes from some of the corporate Tweeting heavyweights interviewed for the report:

“I’ve always been accessible, but Twitter lowers the psychological hurdle people might have in trying to contact me”
-Tony Hsieh @zappos, CEO of Zappos

“For the most part what you see on Twitter is just me being myself.”
-Frank Eliason @comcastcares, Director of digital care for Comcast

“Not only can fans talk to Marvel, but in many cases they can talk to the editor, the writer, or the artist.”
-Ryan Penagos @marvel, Editor at Marvel online

“I think the overwhelming expectation from customers is that we listen to them.”
-Morgan Johnston @JetBlue, Manager of corporate communications for JetBlue Airways

“I believe there is a place for any business to use Twitter. It allows any person, institution or business to become its own wire service.”
-Veronica McGregor @NASA and @MarsPhoenix of NASA

You can read an excerpt from the report at www.ShortyReport.com.

Twitter for business business, data, interviews, research, shorty report, Twitter

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

A post published last month on Pistachio Consulting’s TouchBase blog examines how a public relations team can successfully and non-offensively tweet on a client’s behalf.

Mike Keliher, (@mjkeliher) works in public relations for Provident Partners. Last month, he wrote a guest post for TouchBase explaining how to staff business accounts with multiple people. Mike understood that his web-aware client would use Twitter, that was a given, but the challenge was how to create a single profile maintained by group of users and still retain that cost-of-entry transparency expected of responsible Tweeters.

Mike feels that being honest with your identity on Twitter (as in life) is pivotal. He makes sure the client’s Twitter profile has integrity in the eyes of the Twitter community by establishing up front that it is a team writing the tweets. This is accomplished a few ways.

1) By making it clear on their client’s Twitter profile line bio
2) By changing their display name to add ‘Team’
3) By initialing tweets (we do this with our twitter profiles here at Invoke)
4) by creating a link in the URL section, that explains in more detail who they are and what they do.

Back in September, famous Tweeter / social media whiz Chris Brogan published 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business. Brogan’s list is broken down into 5 categories: First Steps, Ideas About WHAT to Tweet, Some Sanity For You, The Negatives People Will Throw At You and Some Positives to Throw Back.

The list is long and contains an array of ideas, from simple, no-brainers (#2 – add a picture), to some goodies like:

#17 When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
#24 Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
#48 Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.

Numbers 31 – 40 are less ideas for businesses than Twitter criticisms detractors are likely to toss out, but they’re still notable as preparation tools because these types of comments do come up.

Whether you’re new to Twittering for business or just curious about better ways to use the micro-sharing tool, Chris answers a lot of questions. Beyond just business practices, his list is a handy guide to the world of Twitter; it’s definitely worth a peep… or a tweet or two.

Twitter for business

Medialets uses a clever Twitter promotion strategy.

Everyone enjoys winning something, and contests are fun way to get involved. They’re also a powerful tool for gaining new clients and generating a buzz around a product. Contests create an engagement between consumer and business, and empower the audience to help determine an outcome. They’re interactive and democratic–in short, they’re what social media is all about.

Medialets is a creative ad network for native mobile applications. Like us, they believe in innovation and transformative thinking. Last week they held a contest using Twitter. It provides an excellent example of how Twitter can be used to cross-promote two things: a concert and a company.

The contest offered 2 free tickets to the Girl Talk concert in New York. Medialets produced posters with three easy step instructions for how to enter:

· Follow @medialets
· Send a tweet beginning with #medialets explaining why you should win tickets
· Direct message us at @medialets with a) what company you work for b) email address and phone number c) what kind of phone you have

While we don’t know the results of the contest, this, to us, represented a great example of how Twitter can be used in new and different ways. Possible outcomes? Depending on where they put this poster or online graphic, Medialets likely attracted plenty of followers. Presumably some of these followers would have added to the conversation online by passing along useful information about the company, musician and/or the contest. The concert itself may have been better attended as a result. And by requiring entrants to use a #medialets hashtag, Medialets increased their search ratings.

Twitter for business

Last week Jonathan Kash from Pistachio Consulting wrote an article about Molson’s use of Social Media, including Twitter. Ferg Devins, VP Government and Public Affairs of Molson Canada, answers questions about how Molson connects with their community. The article provides some great information about corporate Twitter usage and how fully engaged Molson is in social media.

Tonia Hammer of Molson’s PR Team provided great examples of their Twitter use:

Events: We use Twitter to live-tweet and monitor events. For our Brew 2.0 events in Toronto and Vancouver, we followed the tweets to get feedback and also to share thanks, photos and video.

Promotions: We’ve done tweets with offers – discount code for ShopMolson.com, taxiguy discounts for the holidays

Soliciting Feedback: We ask questions about new websites, promotions, or what people would like to hear from Molson.

http://pistachioconsulting.com/molson-social-media-case-study/. Jonathan Kash. Molson: Brewing Up Success with Social Media. November 13, 2008.

Twitter for business