HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard

As part of their mission of “Uniting the Tech Community,” online tech news source Techvibes partnered up with Carlson Media for a series of one-on-one interviews with leaders in the Vancouver tech community hosted by Victoria Revay – spokeswoman for many fine companies.

The video came at a great time in which the “incubating company” Invoke Media was launching HootSuite & ow.ly into an orbit of it’s own.

“Up in this second episode is Ryan Holmes of Vancouver’s Invoke Media. Invoke is an interactive agency that has been in the news of late after spinning off it’s HootSuite social media dashboard and raising $1.9 Million from outside investors.”

Watch the TechProfile: Ryan Holmes of Invoke Media and HootSuite and jump in with your comments about Ryan’s remarks.

TechProfiles: Invoke Media from Justin Carlson on Vimeo.

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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.

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With recent news about adding funding partners and the newly-released social media iPhone app, the web is brimming with articles about HootSuite. But of particular interest to us are the people and companies who are using the social media dashboard in inspiring and interesting ways – plus teaching others how to spark social media-powered campaigns designed to grow audience and spread messages.

With this in mind, here’s a round-up for reviews, tutorials, punditry and accolades from the past fortnight.

Mashed up for Business

First off, a double does of Mashable and American Express Open Forum – the wise minds and info curators @mashable contribute knowledge to AmEx’s space for SME’s and entrepreneurs to share tips and tactics.

Mashable’s Barb Dybwad (perhaps the coolest Twitter handle ever) shares Essential Social Media Tools for the Small Business which includes CoTweet as well as HootSuite:

If your small business has a presence on Twitter, you’ll want to look into two great and free tools for managing your account: CoTweet and HootSuite. You can think of them essentially as Customer Relationship Management tools for Twitter.

Both services offer a similar core functionality, allowing you to manage multiple individual accounts, give multiple authors access to individual Twitter accounts, search for keywords and monitor saved searches over time, and get message notifications based on certain criteria. Beyond that, each service has its own custom features — and which app is right for your business will depend on who in your organization needs to use it and what functions you need to access in your business.

Another @mashable writer Leah Betancourt contributed 5 Ways Small Businesses Can Avoid Social Media Panic which appear on Mashable and Am EX Open Forum and provides practical tips for busineses to get over the glassy-eyed feeling when adding social media-powered campaigns to their marketing mix – of course her tips include using HootSuite for tracking.

The notion of getting into social media might seem overwhelming for any small business. Spending time upfront before launch to create a plan with goals that includes how to translate that social media presence into dollars will go a long way toward achieving success.

Some examples of metrics to look at are: How many visitors came to your site from a social media site; Conversion (i.e. how many people clicked through to your site and then bought a product or service), Falls said. In minimal terms, be able to say something like: I spent X dollars and was able to track X amount of revenue (or percentage).

Link shorteners can help track click throughs on Twitter. Twitter tools such as Seesmic (), TweetDeck (), HootSuite () and others can help users track mentions, direct messages and @replies.

Hoots for Growth

Inc.com published Lori Highby’s experiences building her web design business in How to Use HootSuite for Business (article is dated Feb 1, 2010 which is in the future ~ whoa) – again practical advice for entrepreneurs:

I use HootSuite to streamline the process. It lets me manage multiple accounts on one dashboard. I can schedule tweets in advance instead of logging on every time I want to send one. When I write a new blog post, HootSuite automatically sends a tweet to my followers. If I’m reading an interesting article online, I can click on the Hootlet feature in my browser’s Favorites bar to send out a tweet with the story’s name and URL. A stats feature lets me see how many people clicked on any given link so I can tailor future tweets accordingly.

I also use HootSuite to keep track of tweets containing certain keywords. Anytime someone mentions Keystone Click, for example, it appears on my HootSuite dashboard. I sift through the responses at the beginning and end of each day, tracking both positive and negative feedback and reaching out to potential customers. I use the search term Web design company to scour Twitter for prospective clients.

BtoBMagazine’s Rich Karpinski addresses businesses looking to gain a foothold with their outreach methods in Twitter tools for teams – As Tweeting evolves into a group activity, applications offer options – and includes a comment from the Chief Executive Owl:

While many marketers still use standalone clients or even Twitter.com for their tweeting, the convoluted workflow requirements for keeping up with Twitter, not to mention all the other social networks, scream for a more capable tool. HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, for instance, calls his company’s app “the ultimate social media dashboard,” and in recent months has added LinkedIn and Facebook postings to its Twitter core. HootSuite counts Dell, Fox and MSNBC among its customers.

Author Holly Reville created a video about how to use Hootsuite to Manage Multiple Accounts & Schedule Tweets – Holly Reville is a humanitarian, an entrepreneur and an author and founder of Xpressive Marketing, specializing in corporate training, cause and social media marketing. (Note: Subscribe to Holly’s YouTube channel for more). Here’s the set-up:

Let’s face it in today’s busy lifestyles we can all use a little help making it easier to keep up with our Social Media efforts. Hootsuite.com is a valuable tool for doing just that. It gives you the ability to manage multiple twitter accounts and schedule tweets ahead of time. Check out this video to learn how!

Helping Haiti

from United Nations Development Programme's Flickr photostream

Speaking of humanitarians, Brad came up with a plan to use HootSuite to schedule reminders to encourage followers to donate to Haiti even when the stirring images fade from the TV broadcast on Lawn with Gnomes post: Hacking Haiti Donations.

I gave to Haiti, did you? While I did give, it just felt like it wasn’t as much as I would like to or can afford at the moment. I thought maybe I’ll take time to work in a local charity? Reality of course set in, the reality that I’m a full-time student and hold a part-time job.

So what’s the idea/hack? It’s simple; 1) Sign up or sign into Hootsuite.

Love that first step and best wishes for your noble quest to help Haiti. BTW United Nations Development Programmer are using Twitter

Quick Hoots

The Marketing Tech blog’s pundit Douglas Karr offers some gentle copywriting advice: Dear Tech Marketers: Stop Marketing Features over Benefits and was kind enough to follow up to my comment:

Congratulations DaveO on the new digs! You’re working for a company with an amazing product. I especially love your iPhone app, I believe it to be the best on the market. Hopefully you can get this post over to your web marketing team, I believe it will help you improve your penetration of the enterprise market. Thanks for coming out and responding – it says a lot about HootSuite!

Blogger James St. John lends a hand to HootSuite’s support efforts with a re-cap of key features including using lists plus adding Facebook and Linkedin in The Professional Twitter Client, for serious marketeers

Seeking More?

hootsuite news amex, blogs, business, case studies, growth, hacking haiti, haiti, HootSuite, mashable, news, sme, tips, tricks

“Our business is about technology, yes. But it’s also about customer relationships,” says Michael Dell. The same is true with Twitter. Twitter is a technological breakthrough which hinges upon the creation of relationships. It works for Dell: they made $2 million off sales from Twitter. So how does a brand on Twitter establish relationships? One answer: sig your tweets.

“Sig” is a term borrowed from email culture, which is short for “signature.” Just as in email, sigs identify the human at the end of a message. A sig takes only three of a tweet’s 140 characters. Here’s an example:

Sigs are especially useful if multiple people tweet for a particular brand profile. They create organizational accountability and help manage workflow. A sig allows one to know who sent a tweet and when it was sent. Inclusion of sigs also values transparency, a high-value attribute on the Internet. Conversation becomes more natural when customers know who they’re talking to.

Sigs are simple to add on your own. For those who tweet often on multiple-editor profiles, HootSuite has made it even easier. One of our long-running features is autosigging, where sigs are automatically inserted into tweets. If you autosig, there’s no need to manually type it in every tweet. Most importantly, nobody in an organization will forget to add their sig — since it’s already there!

Update: A few people have asked when we implemented this feature. HootSuite has featured autosigging since December, 2008. It was part of our first version. We hope you continue to enjoy this feature!

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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