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.

hootsuite news business, CEO, HootSuite, interview, Invoke, ow.ly, ryan holmes, techvibes

Ow.ly update — Now with fewer bots and less spam

The busy times keep rolling with some powerful improvements to click-tracking with Ow.ly – our URL shortening, social sharing and tracking tool.

Problem Bots Thwarted

Twitter is constantly crawled by bots and spiders hungry for new links to follow. We’ve tried to filter these bots out in the past, but they can be sneaky little guys, and some were slipping through our filters. Due to these web-crawlers, some HootSuite users may have noticed inflated click stats over the past few months.

Stats Adjusted

But no longer! With our recent updates to ow.ly, we’re able to filter bots and spiders with greater accuracy. The end result? More precise analytics and stats for our users, so you can measure your influence and reach with a greater degree of confidence.

Because of these important updates, you may see a drop in your reported clickthrough stats. This is normal — what you’re seeing is the fake clicks being swept away from your reports.

Links Protected

While we were at it, we’ve added some important security features to help combat phishing scams and malware.

Every ow.ly URL is now checked against Google’s Safe Browsing database of known malware and phishing URLs. If you click on a malicious ow.ly link, you’ll now see a warning page letting you know that the site may be hazardous to your computer’s health.

Question Period

Note: We always look forward to hearing from you but this blog post is not the channel for support requests – instead, kindly enter your questions, concerns and ideas at HootSuite Support on Get Satisfaction for response plus follow @hootsuite_help for a stream of knowledge.

Learn more about ow.ly’s features and benefits at: Introducing! Ow.ly Social Bar 2.0. Because Sharing is Caring.

Recap

Ow.ly is now safer, faster, and features more reliable statistics. Enjoy the updates! And find help if needed.

Support clicks, improvements, links, ow.ly, social bar, stats, twiter, url, URLs

HootSuite will be updated this evening. The new release includes some new features, and improvements upon the issues reported by some users.

(Please note that the site may be down from 10pm to 12am PST. Fear not! Your prescheduled tweets will still go out during this time.)

New features:

1) Home and @Reply tabs will show “in reply to” links that let you see the tweet being responded to.

2) We’ve added text to the RSS feed settings page to help clarify whether a feed is paused or “feeding.”

3) On the search page, any search you make is automatically saved — no more extra clicks to save your favorite searches to HootSuite!

Improvements:

1) We’ve enhanced our server so using ow.ly should become more efficient and faster.

2) We’ve updated RSS feeds. This should eliminate the problems some have experienced and keep things running smoothly.

3) We’ve updated our click tracker to do a better job of filtering out bot and spiders from your clickthrough stats. This may have the side effect of making your previous stats suddenly shrink as we remove known bots from the database.

4) Clicking on @username within a tweet will now show you recent tweets from that user, rather than starting an @reply tweet.

5) We’ve made mouse-overs on Home/@Reply/DM page more consistent.

6) We’ve solved some of those pesky IE6 bugs.

Thanks for your feedback, everyone.

customer service click tracker, feedback, ow.ly, rss, update