HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard

The results are in! HootSuite has won Mashable’s 2009 Open Web Award for Best Twitter App. We’re incredibly honoured by the vote of confidence Twitter users have shown us through the OWAs.

This award is a crowning achievement that caps off a whirlwind year for us. HootSuite has also won Shorty and Canadian New Media Awards, and was selected as a finalist in the prestigious Groundswell Awards.

A year after launching, HootSuite has become the most used Twitter web client after Twitter itself. In November, HootSuite also added Facebook and LinkedIn functionality. This month, we’ve released our iPhone app to much fanfare. Through all this, our goal is to be your go-to professional social media dashboard.

Thank you to Mashable for hosting this award, to everybody who voted for us, and to users such as yourselves for inspiring us to make the Best Twitter App!

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HootSuite was recently selected as a finalist for the prestigious Groundswell Awards, in recognition of the successful social media campaign run for the HootSuite 2.0 launch.  Hosted by the internationally recognized technology and market research company, Forrester Research Inc, the Groundswell awards recognize the most outstanding social technology applications with a unique focus on business performance. HootSuite was in owl-tastic company with our fellow finalists, including but not limited to the Bank of America, Adobe, and MasterCard.

For nine years, the Canadian New Media Awards have recognized and celebrated the accomplishments of the nation’s digital media movers and shakers. We’re happy to announce that CNMA has selected HootSuite as a finalist in this year’s awards. HootSuite is being recognized in the “Best Use of Social Media” category, which highlights “excellent use of social media for business, arts and community,” reflecting the runaway success HootSuite has had in the past year.

A big thank you to Forrester Research and the Canadian New Media Awards for recognizing HootSuite. We Sal-hoot you!

Twitter, hootsuite news, social media Canadian New Media Awards, Forrester Research Inc, Groundswell Awards, social media, twitter client

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?

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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

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HootSuite 2.0, meet the public. The public, meet HootSuite 2.0.

The wait is finally over!  Following our closed beta, HootSuite 2.0 is going live to the public! And what can you expect? The hottest features you suggested, all intended to save time and increase efficiency. HootSuite 2.0 was designed to allow you and your team to get the most out of your Twitter experience.

Still have questions?  Our FAQ page houses many answers. Inquire within.

Do you like HootSuite… or do you love it? Tell us what you think! Our Get Satisfaction feedback forum contains loads of ideas, as well as answers to many common questions.  The feedback forum is a place for you to suggest ideas, give praise, report issues and give praise.

Who are we? Good question! Discover who we are and how we came to be in the About section.

Thank you to all our supporters! We couldn’t have done it without you.  Our new and improved version is jammed full of owl-tastic features which make it the essential Twitter client for power users and businesses.

HootSuite 2.0: the professional Twitter client

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In the age of sharing, linking, retweeting, capped attention spans and character limits, people need things to be shorter, better, faster, stronger. The Ow.ly social bar is your answer.

What does this mean for you, the content creator? The social media marketing wizard? The link sharing, social bookmarking and retweeting addict? Actually, we’ve packed this toolbar with so many useful features that we’d like to think it means quite a lot.

For the active social media participant:

• Sharing functionality remains the focal point of the Ow.ly social bar. This feature will keep your eyes on prize content and allow you to share easily and frequently – we care how you share!
• Slimmer and non-obtrusive because we know just how valuable web browser real estate can be.
• Bookmarking of links that you have retweeted. (coming soon)

For the content creators, prolific publishers, savvy social media marketers and web developers, ow.ly 2.0 has a ton of features that you and your readers will find useful:

• Drastically increase the amount of clicks on every submitted link thanks to stickier and more versatile sharing functionality.
• Ow.ly links won’t harm SEO because they’re designed to allow Google and other search engine spiders access to the content without stealing any Google juice.
• Increased brand recognition via brand/logo recognition that links to your website/twitter account.
• Statistics are also accessible via API where you can also monitor the velocity and dissemination of shared content. (coming soon)
• Readers can vote on shared content and give you their valuable yay or nay assessment.
• One click opt-out. We recognize everyone is different. So, if you or your users happen not to like it? Not a problem. One click and anyone can opt-out of ever seeing an Ow.ly social bar again.

Interested in finding out how you can get an Ow.ly social bar of your own? Contact us to learn more.

UPDATE: There have been a lot of questions regarding how to get an ow.ly Social Bar. First off, thank you for all of your enthusiasm and positive feedback! Secondly, anyone can USE the social bar right now. Anyone looking to share content can simply use HootSuite, the Hootlet or ow.ly to shorten the URL. People who click on ow.ly links will be able to see the ow.ly social bar and benefit from the bar’s features. Those interested in partnering with the API in the future should visit http://ow.ly/socialbar and sign up for more information.

Twitter, features

You asked for it… and here it is: We just introduced Ping.fm integration on HootSuite.com.

What’s Ping.fm? Think of it as your social network glue.

A Ping.fm account lets you send a single update to multiple networks simultaneously: Facebook, Wordpress, MySpace, LinkedIn, and more. And now you’re able to send those updates through HootSuite to take advantage of scheduling, clickthrough stats, and all the sweet goodness HootSuite has to offer.

Here’s how it works:

1) Sign up for Ping.fm:

2) Hook all your social networks up to Ping.fm:

(Don’t worry about adding your Twitter account to Ping.fm — HootSuite will handle your Twitter updates.)

3) Add some custom triggers to Ping.fm, if you like.

Triggers let you specify a subset of social network accounts that you’d like to post to. For example, you could create a trigger called “status” and have that trigger only send updates to Facebook and GTalk, for example.


4) In HootSuite, as an admin, click on “Settings.” At the bottom of the “Account” tab, you’ll see a Ping.fm section.


5) Paste in your application key, and add a trigger if you like. (If you leave the trigger field blank, it’ll try to send to all your Ping.fm networks.)

6) Choose which Twitter profiles should send data to Ping.fm.

…And that’s it! Any tweets sent from the selected Twitter profiles will be sent to Ping.fm.

This is an early release of this feature, and we’re super excited about the possibilities.

A few things to be aware of:

* DMs are not sent to Ping.fm. Any tweets starting with “d username” or “dm username” are considered DMs.

* Any RSS feeds you’ve set up in HootSuite will not be sent to Ping.fm. This helps us avoid issues where a Ping.fm-enabled blog is linked via RSS to HootSuite, which sends to Ping.fm, which sends to HootSuite… eventually destroying the Internet.

* Your tweets are sent to Twitter by HootSuite, then sent to Ping.fm. If you have your Twitter account linked to Ping.fm, don’t worry — we won’t send to any Twitter accounts linked through Ping.fm. This helps avoid duplicate postings.

* We’re not currently parsing the tweet itself for triggers. Ping.fm’s API requires triggers and message text sent separately. Rather than worry about parsing on our end, you’ll need to set up a trigger through the Settings page if you want to use one.

We’ve already got some ideas about how we might improve Ping.fm integration… here are a few things we’re considering:

1. Allowing you to select a trigger for each tweet — so you can more easily control where your messages are going on a per-tweet basis.
2. Allowing you to set up multiple Ping.fm keys (for example, if certain Twitter profiles should send updates to one Ping.fm account, and others should send updates to another).
3. More-better-izing. =)

Your feedback is, as always, much appreciated!

Twitter, features, hootsuite news, social media hootsuite news, ping.fm

“It’s a wonderful broadening experience to be on a social network” – Guy Kawasaki
Here’s a short clip of Guy Kawasaki explaining why he uses Twitter, more so than other social network sites. Twitter has created thousands of relationships for Guy, cut the cost of communication, and has made face-to-face meet ups anywhere in the world possible.
Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine.

http://fora.tv/2008/11/17/Guy_Kawasaki_on_the_Power_of_Twitter

Twitter Guy Kawasaki, Twitter