HootSuite Social Media Management

Without the right tools, getting your business seen in the social media arena can be a daunting and exhausting task. With geo-location and geo-targeting built into the dash, HootSuite offers advanced tools to help streamline these tasks. To help you get started, we’re pleased to offer this free HootGuide – Using Geo-Location and Targeting with HootSuite.

Using Geo-Location and Targeting with HootSuite is the next in a series of HootGuides to be released by HootSuite. Through this series, you will learn the ins and outs of the dashboard’s features, helping you achieve and maintain social media success.

Read more…

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Being effective with your social campaigns means getting your brand noticed amongst the unending chatter of social networks. So how do you join the conversation? Before you send your first tweet, set yourself up for success with a solid social strategy.

To get you started, HootSuite has a White Paper ready for you to download today. The Introduction to HootSuite Social Media Best Practices is designed to help businesses starting out with social media — or those seeking more effective engagement and measurement opportunities. From planning to participating, this paper outlines the tips you need to move the needle with your social networking.

Download your copy today, share it with colleagues and managers, and start working on your social success.

Read more…

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Reach the next level of social media management with HootSuite’s newest publishing tools: Publisher views, Limited Permissions and Profile Picker.

Social Media Scheduling

HootSuite was the first social media tool to offer message scheduling, now with the new publisher tool, you can plan your updates with greater ease. Slice and dice the destination profiles for each message and drag-and-drop your updates into timeslots to match your editorial plans.

While the whole power of daily/weekly/monthly calendar view is available with Pro and Enterprise plans, everyone can take the advanced scheduling functionality for a spin to see how calendar views can manage complex campaigns.

HootSuite Publisher Calendar View

This publisher tool takes the place of the former Pending Tweets column – to get started, click the paper airplane in the Launch Bar and plan (and edit) your posts across networks.

Limited for Control

Have an intern who’s not quite ready to take the reins to your corporate social profiles? With new Limited Profiles, Enterprise teams can prevent gaffes and stay on course with a “read & draft” account.

With this designation, your collaborating interns, contractors and new recruits can share search streams and compose messages, but are limited from broadcasting directly to valuable corporate profiles. Instead, drafts are held for approval in the calendar view until a qualified Team Member pushes to the send queue. It’s ideal for ensuring accurate and appropriate updates. This feature is the latest in a swath of social media security features added to the dashboard.

Smarter Selections

Increase your publishing IQ by selecting profiles – one, several or all – in the new Publisher view with a convenient auto-complete text field for broadcasting messages.

Save time by creating a list of favorite profiles which are ready at a single click plus select your frequently updated account as a default. You’ll feel like a genius with all the time you save.

Articles with Answers

The diligent Support Owls have updated the Help Desk with operational articles about these tools. Wing by for screenshots and step-by-steps about your new tools. Have more ideas? Share your thoughts or vote up other suggestions on the HootSuite  Feedback Channel.

For additional information and screenshots, please visit the HootSuite Smart Publishing press release, available in both English and Spanish.

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Uptime is Everything

For web-centric companies like HootSuite, last Thursday was a worst-case scenario. With major service interruptions to Amazon Web Services, HootSuite was down for approximately 15 hours until our engineers restored service.

In general, we enjoy stellar performance with minimal outages on either HootSuite or Owly (our URL shortener) and now service over 3 million social networks sending over a million updates per day with almost zero downtime. We also have held strong during very active posting periods including the Japanese earthquake.

We know how important up-time is for you and truly appreciate the kind words from our users who missed using HootSuite. Further, many of you rely on HootSuite for your business and we take your trust seriously. As such, we’re taking all steps to prevent future mishaps.

What follows are notes about what we’re doing to “make it right” plus a technical breakdown about “what happened.” Read more…

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In keeping with highest industry standards, HootSuite has elevated security to a higher level with application-wide SSL as well as Secure Profiles on 3 mobile platforms.

These powerful features add another level of protection for your valuable social profiles. HootSuite’s security benefits also include account provisioning which allow you to share access to profiles without sharing passwords, plus malware and spam prevention measures.

Account Provisioning, Secure Profiles, HTTPS, and Safe Links to keep your data safe

All these tools help prevent nefarious attacks and clumsy accidents so, whether you are sharing State secrets, business announcements or your Grandma’s recipes, your data is now even safer.

Lock it Down

HootSuite is now HTTPS enabled which means you can opt-in for a more secure data transfer when logged in to the dashboard on public networks. Once you’ve selected this secure mode, your messages and accounts are protected with SSL/TLS – including “cookies” which track your session login status and can be exploited to gain access to your account.

Perhaps you saw the recent news about socially-stacked Ashton Kutcher‘s Twitter account being hacked at a TED conference earlier this year. Indeed, savvy ill-willed intruders can find loop-holes in unsecured networks and break into accounts, hijacking them for personal use. Now with HTTPS, all of your HootSuite data is encrypted, preventing access from unsecured networks.

Getting Secure: To prevent conflicts with some corporate firewalls and browsers, HTTPS must be manually enabled in HootSuite. To go secure, simply :

• Go to https://hootsuite.com/dashboard (note the “s”), OR
• Choose Settings, then Preferences and click the “HTTPS” button
• More help articles: how to enable https; what is secure mode; unsecure pop-up

You’ll know you are secured when you see a specific icon in your browser: In Chrome, the lock next to the web address bar will turn Green. In Safari, you’ll see a (very tiny) lock icon in the top right corner of the window. In Firefox, you’ll see a lock icon on the far left of your address bar. In Internet Explorer, the lock icon is towards the right of the address bar.

Mobile Ready: All HootSuite mobile apps – iPhone/ iPad, BlackBerry and Android – are also HTTPS-ready for protected messaging on-the-go, plus now you’re even more secure on the web from wherever you login.

Prevent Mobile Mishaps

Following up on the recent Secure Profiles announcement, HootSuite Enterprise teams can now utilize a safety ‘double check’ before posting via mobile devices. Secure Profiles are designed to provide high-profile brands with greater control when sending messages from corporate profiles by preventing unintended (and possibly off-brand) messages from posting.

Now, Secure Profiles are available on all HootSuite-supported mobile platforms for Enterprise customers using Android, iPhone/iPad or BlackBerry.

When a social profile team member posts to a secured profile, they will see a pop-up that prompts to confirm or cancel the message. The version for web was released earlier this month following a series of messaging mis-haps on Twitter  including some expressing colorful opinions on driving in Detroit. Scott Bartosiewicz experienced this first-hand, and is now a Hootfan for life:

More On The Way

HootSuite continues to grow the toolkit of security-focused features. Stay tuned for more releases coming soon by following @HootWatch & @HootSuite on Twitter. Please let us know what other features you like by writing a suggestion, or voting up another, on the HootSuite Feedback Request Channel.

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HootSuite is pleased to announce the release of the all new Secure Profiles feature – a tool designed to prevent high-profile brands from accidentally posting personal updates from valuable corporate profiles.

Slide to Protect

The integrity of your messaging is crucial to your brand’s reputation. This is especially true online where errant messages can be picked up and re-broadcast to a world-wide audience before you realize the message even exists. But in this fast-paced, always-online business climate, mistakes can be made — and this is a concern for large brands with multiple social media contributors.

Now you can get in front of PR conundrums before they even occur. HootSuite Secure Profiles have been designed specifically for organizational teams so that:

• Account owners can designate chosen social profiles as “Secure”
• Team members are prompted to confirm or cancel messages before sending
• Secure Profiles are available on web (iPhone, Android and Blackberry available shortly)

Message Mishaps

When you’re dealing with humans, mistakes are inevitable. Even the most experienced and fine-tuned social media teams can find themselves spending valuable time and resources to undo or deflect split-second mishaps.

A team member who isn’t paying attention might accidentally select the wrong profile to publish their personal message to. Before you know it, you could have a Tweet expressing views on anything from driving skills to drinking preferences which may not be reflective of your brand.

This tool was built in response to incidents in which personal messages were broadcast over official brand accounts including @ChryslerAutos, @redcross and @marcjacobsintl. Each of these unique situations caused marketplace confusion and affected brand sentiment – and they were all preventable.

While some of these errant updates were elegantly mitigated, in each case, HootSuite’s security-focused tools could have prevented the distracting media attention.

We’ve closely watched the recent stories about unintended Tweets and wanted to help companies prevent social media mishaps. With HootSuite’s Team Provisioning and Secure Profiles tool, organizations can continue using social media to promote their brand confidently while maintaining a high degree of security.”

– Ryan Holmes, HootSuite CEO

Enterprise-Ready Security

The value of using social media to broadcast messages, engage audiences and monitor your brand online is immense. The social web is an incredible forum for building community and brand awareness, so ensure that your efforts are not undone by simple mistakes.

The Secure Profiles feature is available exclusively as part of HootSuite’s Enterprise plan. Designed for large organizations with multiple team members, the Enterprise plan includes access to comprehensive tools to monitor, engage and measure your social media ROI. Visit hootsuite.com/enterprise to schedule a free personal demo with the @HootBusiness team.

Social Advice

To help maximize your social media efforts, visit our growing library for an Info Sheet entitled Social Media Security. This one is all about using HootSuite’s many team security functions. You’ll also find many other helpful Info Sheets and Case Studies that outline examples of using social smartly.

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We don’t have to tell you that social media is everywhere – and the rapid rise in popularity shows no signs of slowing. The result of this growth is that many companies are still learning the power of social media and striving to understand how it can be put to work for their organizations.

For this reason, we’ve partnered with Useful Social Media to produce a white paper examining the role of social media for enterprise businesses. This report – entitled The State of Corporate Social Media 2011 – includes a forward written by HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes, and identifies evolving trends and tactics, plus outlines current expenditures and budgets of hundreds of corporate social media practitioners.

Even if you aren’t a business-minded social media user, you’ll likely enjoy comparing between trends and tactics in USA and Europe. In all, it’s full of truly useful information which can be applied to your organization’s social efforts straight-away. We hope you enjoy it as much as we have enjoyed bringing it to you.

Useful Social Media

Whether you’re a business looking to work social media tactics into your organization, or an individual who simply wants to see how trends are evolving in the corporate-sphere, this white paper has all the facts and figures to help you out.

The information is designed to help incorporate learnings from the state of corporate social media today. E.g.:

• See how corporate social media use differs from Europe to North America
• Review over 30 charts summarizing details collected from more than 100 corporate practitioners
• Learn from the report’s top ten conclusions
• Peruse over 20 pages of insight and analysis on what these results mean for your organization’s social media activities

Head on over to Useful Social Media to download your copy of the State of Corporate Social Media briefing 2011 to start using the helpful advice for your business right away.

More Helpful Hoots

We want to keep you up-to-date with the latest and greatest in HootSuite news, advice and releases. So keep an eye on @HootWatch for helpful tips and late-breaking information for using social media for your business.

And remember, we’re always here to help — visit our Help Desk and Community Support Forum to find hundreds of articles and how-to’s for using the social media dashboard.

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Happy New Year – we hope you had a great holiday season filled with lots of happy hooting! Owly had a nice vacation, and is back and ready for a big 2011.

The HootSuite App Directory is coming along nicely, and still on pace for launch early this year. There is a lot of excitement in the development community and we’ll have some big announcements to share with you soon.

You may remember the news about the App Directory in December – briefly, we previewed the popular Salesforce Chatter and Lead Scoring Apps, and released Ning as a live preview of what you can expect to see from the App Directory. These announcements certainly garnered some attention, and in case you missed it, here are some highlights of the coverage and feedback.

Chatter about Chatter

The Next Web - SalesForce.com Chatter Coming to HootSuite

Imagine having a team chat built into your regular information tool? At TNW we, of course, have lots of tools to help us keep up with the news. Twitter is just one of them, but we have a back channel as well. We’re always looking for new solutions to explore. Maybe SalesHootChatterSuite might be just the ticket.

Chatter in the HootSuite dashboard (click for larger version)

Techvibes - Vancouver’s HootSuite Collaborates with Salesforce, Integrates Apps into Dashboard

Today at Dreamforce, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes revealed a preview of the upcoming Salesforce integration into HootSuite. This integration will tie into the HootSuite App Directory launch, which is slated for early next year.

This is a big feat, considering how huge Salesforce is. HootSuite has come far in its short life.

Read Write Web - 3 Services That Leverage the New Salesforce REST API

HootSuite is a Twitter client that has focused on building an app platform. In November, the company announced a new API and App Directory. HootSuite now integrates with Salesforce Chatter via the API. That means a user may view a Twitter stream and Chatter in the same interface.

HootSuite is a natural fit with Chatter. Both use the same river of news style. And both have a direct tie in to the fast adoption of social technologies in enterprise and business settings.

Sing-ing Praise for Ning

Social Media Examiner - This Week in Social Media: The News You Need to Know

With this integration, the 1 million HootSuite users can now broadcast to Ning’s participants – which number upwards of 70 million users across 80,000 social websites – and connect with them on the topics they are passionate about. Will you find this new feature helpful?

Ning in the HootSuite dashboard (click for larger version)

Blogg-ing with Ning

Ning invited us to a special guest blog post on the Ning blog which explains the HootSuite / Ning integration. The post provides five things you can do with HootSuite today to help build and nurture networks and communities.

• Broadcast over Multiple Services…
• Monitor Member Activity…
• Better Manage Multiple Services…
• In-Depth Analytics…
• Collaborate with Teams…

We were happy to contribute to their blog and share helpful tips about using Ning in the dashboard to build your audience. And we thought this would be a great time to let you know that even more exciting tools are on the way.

More ‘Appiness…

The Next Web - Build Apps for HootSuite with App Exchange

Twitter might want to become a service platform, but it looks like HootSuite wants to become the app platform of choice for Twitter clients. HootSuite announced today a new API and App Exchange to allow other providers and developers to build specialty add-on applications for HootSuite…

Real time chat integrated into my Twitter client? Maybe connected to GoogleTalk? That would be cool and it would eliminate an app I need to run. Connect to FriendFeed? Another. Really good alerts and Growl integration?

The more tools that HootSuite can replace with add-ons and still not bog down the app or clutter the interface up. The more people who will use it.

And keep using it.

From the Twitter-sphere

@andybryant: Great development for Social CRM: HootSuite to integrate Salesforce Chatter & Lead Scoring

@cozimek: @salesforce Chatter + @hootsuite = happy businessman.

@nmwallace: Yeah!! Wooohooo! HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard » Ning Social Communities Added to HootSuite Dashboard

@kentanjo: Talk about going social! Two powerful tools to engage online public: Ning and HootSuite

Stay Tuned

There’s more exciting news to share in the coming weeks regarding the HootSuite App Directory. Make sure to follow @HootSuite_Apps to stay up to date with all the latest.

If you have an idea for an app to add to the HootSuite dashboard, share it with us in the Community Feedback Forum. For early launch consideration, developers can apply for API access.

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Idea to Reality

In just six short weeks, we crafted an idea and turned it into a reality. In early November, we embarked on a mission to provide more new tools to help HootSuite users manage more social media activities and networks through a new API. Last week, HootSuite announced integrations with the popular Salesforce Chatter & Lead Scoring apps which will be included in the forthcoming App Directory.

Time for Ning

Today, we are excited to share the latest addition to the HootSuite nest: Ning. We worked closely with the engineers at the popular social network platform to develop using our API, and our collaboration has allowed us to release Ning into the dashboard just in time for the holidays!

Ning is the leading online platform for the world’s organizers, activists and influencers to create social experiences that inspire action. For brands and organizations of all shapes and sizes, Ning span categories like politics, entertainment, small business, non-profits, education and more.

Ning in the HootSuite dashboard (click for large version)

With Ning, you have the ability to engage your most passionate customers by creating social websites where you can create and manage direct relationships, encourage feedback and sharing, and turn your most valued customers into brand evangelists.

A Match Made of Millions

With this integration, the 1 million HootSuite users can now broadcast to Ning’s participants – which number upwards of 70 million users across 80,000 social websites – and connect with them about the topics they are passionate about. So, get social with Ning today!

Once you sign up for a Ning account, simply add it to your HootSuite dashboard, and you’re ready to start posting messages, monitor conversations, plus view profiles and images in-dash and more… in much the same way you do with your other social services.

Now, all HootSuite users can add Ning to their dashboard free of charge for 30 days as a preview of what’s to come as we continue in the development of the forthcoming HootSuite App Directory. You can also enjoy a 30 day free trial of Ning to see how these tools can work wonders together.

Flying Forward Faster

We surprised ourselves by releasing Ning much earlier than anticipated as the directory is still in development. Stay tuned to the blog for more app details leading up to launch early 2011.

If you have an idea for an app to add to the HootSuite dashboard, share it with us in the Community Feedback Forum. For early launch consideration, developers can apply for API Access plus follow @HootSuite_Apps to Q&A.

Additional Information

For more info about HootSuite, please visit the online media kit where you’ll find logos, contact information and additional resources. To learn more about Ning, please visit about.ning.com.

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Today at Dreamforce, HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes revealed a preview of the upcoming Salesforce integration into HootSuite. This integration will tie into the HootSuite App Directory launch, slated for early next year.

We are excited to announce the first apps to be made available: Salesforce’s Chatter and Lead Scoring web applications. With more than 87,000 active (and successful) SMB and Enterprise customers and millions of individual users, Salesforce is an established leader for sales teams.

Collaborate & Coordinate

By adding the popular Chatter (enterprise collaboration tool) and Lead Scoring (lead generation and prioritization tool) functionalities into the HootSuite dashboard, sales and marketing teams will have a powerful new way to efficiently collaborate as well as coordinate and prioritize new leads. Plus users can complete these tasks from within the same tool used to monitor social media conversations.

Following these conversations adds a handy way to get to know your customers before starting negotiations as well as generating leads by tracking keywords. By keeping these conversations and customer intelligence resources in one centralized view, teams will increase productivity. Instead of switching back and forth between tabs and windows to view the various apps, simply add these apps as streams within your familiar HootSuite tool.

Hatching Soon

The forthcoming HootSuite App Directory will feature tools which expand the capabilities of the dashboard by integrating apps into streams. The directory will launch early next year giving developers time to create many of the ideas we receive in the Community Feedback Forum. If you have an idea, be sure to share it in the Feedback Channel.

To be considered for early launch, developers should apply for API Access and be sure to keep checking the HootSuite blog and follow @HootSuite_Apps for all the latest developments.

Eager for Chatter?

Want to know the latest on when Chatter and other apps will be released? Want to case your vote for the apps you’d like to see added? Simply sign up at: http://ow.ly/3mcTB. You’ll receive an email when the tool is added and ready to go.

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