Wondering how the HootSuite social media dashboard can help your business or organization engage with social networks and web conversations? Great! We can help.
Check out this first-in-a-series HootSuite Info Sheet called “The Basics” — a brief document explaining the core tools in HootSuite including tactics for spreading messages, monitoring conversations, collaborating with teams, and tracking results. Additionally, this document points out the integrated social networks, plus shares a few noteworthy clients and methods to get more help.
Share these info sheets with your collegues, teams, managers, etc. by downloading or embedding from Slide Share. Keep an eye out for more to come and find the growing collection in the Library section of the HootSuite blog.
Keeping the media reports rolling out with another round-up of recent article about HootSuite. This time, the focus is on business users with a batch of tips, rankings, reviews and soliloquies about saving time, keeping an eye on assets and giving a hoot.
Settle in for a read to learn how to save time while increasing results in your social promotion campaigns.
Ryan Holmes - (cropped) photo by Lyle Stafford for National Post
Matt Hartley writes: In essence, Hootsuite users can track who’s talking about their company who’s passing around links related to promotions and news and what services they’re using to do so.
“That’s kind of the Holy Grail of what Hootsuite does,” Mr. Holmes said.
“Social media marketing didn’t really exist as a job title prior to the last couple of years, but we’re really building this as a tool for them and also traditional marketers that are looking for tools,” he said.
Jolie O’Dell writes: We’ve noticed that HootSuite has been cranking out major upgrades consistently over the past several months. In terms of team collaboration and CRM social media tools, this company seems to be en fuego. Last week, HootSuite added Facebook support and geolocation features to its iPhone app.
By Zachary Sniderman via Mashable: Managing a million different social media sites is a headache for even the most seasoned social media-ites. But what happens when your business is expected to maintain a Twitter account, a Facebook Page, or a WordPress blog?
Updating all those sites takes time and energy, but social media hubs like Hootsuite can help any small business efficiently manage their social media presence. Hootsuite is a free website that allows users to update, post, monitor, and track a range of popular social media services.
Like other social media hubs, Hootsuite’s hub can be customized to suit your needs. Whether you’re tracking one or multiple accounts across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, Hootsuite might be an efficient, secure way to stay on top of all of them. Below are five quick ways to maximize Hootsuite … Read on …
Suite101.com, a global content site that provides trusted and reliable information to consumers today released its second annual readership index of Canadian-owned Web sites, entitled “Where The Online Readers Are.” The second annual index reveals that the top sites remain largely content sites, and social media activity by the top-trafficked sites has increased substantially.
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2 Ow.ly http://ow.ly/ 468 new URL shortener
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7 HootSuite www.hootsuite.com 877 new Marketing
Camille Ricketts writes: Mobile location application Foursquare is diversifying itself into a platform of its own today by launching an aggregation of third-party applications built on top of its core service. It’s calling it the App Gallery.
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Currently, the featured apps include HootSuite (a service to share your favorite locations with your friends), Kickball (a new interface design), FourFace (a creative interface changer) and Mob Zombies (a game that plays on the zombie apocalypse meme).
David Garland writes: There are streams everywhere. Facebook. Twitter. Plus more. Information coming at you at a crazy pace. Now add in the fact, that many of us entrepreneurs are creating our own valuable content and promoting it. And keeping tabs on when our business pops up in a conversation. And paying attention to our niches. The list goes on and on.
Whew, I’m exhausted just thinking about it. So, what is the solution? What is an easy way to make it all manageable from anywhere (your computer, phone, etc.)? Ryan Holmes, founder of Invoke, came up with the solution for us entrepreneurs: Hootsuite.
As CEO of Hootsuite, Ryan has developed a unique platform that makes this quickly changing web easy to understand and manage. I had a chance to sit down (errr Skype down?) with Ryan and discuss Hootsuite for all of us.
What we hope to accomplish by using HootSuite is a more centralized place for managing our communications. We set up an account, using our company name and proceeded to add each of the company twitter accounts and our own personal accounts. Now, either of us can use the streamlined interface to “tweet” from our personal account or “tweet” from either of the company accounts.
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… more importantly, HootSuite can now track how many times a link was clicked. This lets us know which messages generated the most traffic for our websites. The more traffic, the more likely we are to establish ourselves as experts in what we’re doing and hopefully generate more leads for business.
Mark Thompson writes: In my personal opinion, I have found Hootsuite to be by far the best Twitter client out there. I’m sure a lot of people can make an argument for clients like Tweetdeck and Seesmic, but I find Hootsuite to be the most user-friendly, feature-rich, and up-to-date Twitter client available.
The interface is clean, customizable, and includes a wealth of information about your twitter account. Let’s take a detailed look into how Hootsuite can be used to manage your daily engagements for both personal and business use.
If you’re wanting to save a step, I’d try HootSuite, a free site that will allow you to post to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts at once. It also has a built-in link shortener.
If you have people with social media duties, you can give them different privileges on HootSuite without sharing your log-in information to the site. Also, you can edit access to specific social media accounts you have on Hootsuite. For example, if you have your personal Twitter account added on to HootSuite, you can select just the work account for access privileges.
Hootsuite for those that don’t know it or use it is about to get downright nasty in this game. Not nasty in a bad way but the app has grown and it’s going to sick. Forget the discussion internally about ROI and team management, this group has got it for you.
Key 4: Learn to monitor social media efficiently. Programs like TweetDeck, HootSuite and Seesmic make sharing content and links across Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook simpler. To monitor networks for inbound linking opportunities and reputation management, search columns for keywords or hashtags are extremely helpful. Additional monitoring can be done through Twitter Search and TweetBeep, while an overall online presence can be surveyed with tools like Trackur, Google Alerts or SocialMention.
F5 Expo in Vancouver is April 7th. It’s a technology tradeshow plus panels & features keynotes by Malcolm Gladwell and Tod Maffin. The HootSuite crew plus Senior Strategists from Invoke Media will be there sharing tips on using Twitter for Business – be sure to come on by to learn some new tactics for spreading messages, tracking conversations and measuring what works.
Here’s how the schedule looks so far:
10:00am ~ Tracking Conversations
Learn what people are saying about your company and/or brand
Learn what people are saying about your competitors
Jump into the conversation without stepping on any toes
Prospecting for new customers
10:45am ~ Know Your Audience
The people at the end of the numbers
What kind of Twitter’ers are they
How to out-reach to influencers
How to be someone people want to follow
11:30am ~ Building Culture
Contests with Twitter
Promotional campaigns using Twitter
Re-tweeting and replying
Copywriting for Twitter
1:00pm ~ Measuring Success
What to measure and what matters
All click throughs are not created equal
Learn where your users are
Mentions > Conversions > Evangelism
Photo Opp with Owly
In between these engaging workshops you can get your photo taken with HootSuite’s Owly, giving you a chance to win fun prizes. Fly by Booth 108 for your chance to schmoooze with the elusive Owl.
The F5 Expo is coming up on April 7th in Vancouver at the (new grass-roofed) classic Canada Place Convention Centre and features a keynote by renowned thinker (and Canadian) MalcolmGladwell (@gladwell) along with a trade show and variety of panels.
HootSuite is participating in a few different capacities – from panels to photo opps – and invite you to join in the fun at the Trade Show with a complimentary ticket.
Fistful of Tickets
We have a stash of tradeshow passes to give away to people who get in touch by raise their hand. Just send a Twitter note to HootSuite Community Wrangler @daveohoots. While these tickets won’t get you into see Mr. Gladwell’s remarks, there is plenty of fun on the floor too.
Be the Feed
HootSuite is an F5 media sponsor so you’ll see our familiar dashboard on the presentation screen streaming all of the #F5Expo tagged Tweets – including yours. Plus look for the sign with the unique #hashtag for each panel to participate in the “back channel” conversation.
Twitter for Biz
HootSuite is hosting 4 Twitter for Business panels starting at 10am and lasting approximately 15 minutes each. The panels will feature local experts (including the HootSuite and Invoke crew) and will focus on Twitter for Business.
Blurb: Whether you’re already on the Twitter bandwagon or you see it as merely the latest trend, recognizing the impact of microblogging on business is important. Trends in this area are quickly emerging and evolving. For example, companies are now paying high ranking twitter members to talk about them. It’s a turn (perhaps for the worst) in social media campaigns. Stay in the know by learning about new twitter trends and the impact they could have on your business. More importantly, get to know some basic rules that will help you build a loyal following.
The Owl has been known to cavort with celebs like Wyclef Jean and MC Hammer – yup, a *very* big deal. So fly by Booth 108 for your chance to schmoooze with the elusive Owl.
Sometimes the best way to learn is from others’ mistakes
Participate in an intriguing discussion on start-ups that have failed. Did you know that companies like Apple had several flops before they got it right? or that web tv was first bought by Microsoft in 1997 and failed? However, web tv, today, is on an upward trend towards mass adoption. This exemplifies that failure doesn’t always reflect the end of an idea.
Attend this dynamic session to uncover the critical components of timing, as well as learning the difference between when to give up and when to push harder.
Experience comes from a series of overcoming bad decisions and sometimes timing is everything.
Phone it in
To keep up with the F5 schedule on the go with the F5 Expo iPhone app. Gratis.
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.
