Hoot Suite – A Great Twitter/Social Media Client

HootSuite

Twitter is turning out to be a good tool for branding and sending out information to people interested in your company. One of the best tools I have used for Twitter is Hoot Suite. It’s a web based Twitter client that you can manage multiple accounts at once.

It’s very easy to set up, all you have to do is sign up at Hoot Suite and then put in the Twitter names and passwords. You can set up your screen with the current Twitter stream of all the people you are following. Options for columns views can be @ mentions, scheduled tweets, Direct messages, continuous search results and twitter lists, and many more possibilities. The @ mentions makes it so much easier to find who spoke to you and reply to them. Direct messages, if you aren’t familiar with Direct Messages they are messages sent to you on twitter that only you see. Other options are that you can see scheduled tweets and sent tweets.

Here are some of the features I like:

  • Scheduling Tweets
    • As I just mentioned you can schedule tweets to go out in the future. Hoot Suite allows you to schedule tweets on 5-minute intervals. This means you can schedule a tweet for 3:35, but you can’t do 3:33. You must pick 3:30 or 3:35.
  • Real time tweeting
    • One of the best features it’s real time. It updates like the twitter website site does. A few other clients I have used are delayed. Which makes it harder to keep up with conversation and you sometimes comment too late.
  • Analytics
    • The service has a built in easy to use analytics. To take advantage of the service, there is a section to put in a url or picture. It creates a link based on http://ow.ly address. Once the link is tweeted out, you can check our settings to see how many people clicked the link.
  • Auto Fill for @ replies
    • Have you ever talked to someone on Twitter, and it’s someone you talked too and added to your follow list, but can’t recall the name? You know the first couple letters. Well, Hoot Suite does a type of autofill and starts to bring up each of the names with those letters.
  • Conversations – makes them easier to follow.
    • Conversations are easier to follow in Hoot Suite. Not only are your tweets given this feature, everyone you follow will have a “follow the conversation” link. So you can see exactly what was said.
  • Facebook & Linked in support.
    • Social media can bring you major overload. You now can update multiple platforms at once. Hoot Suite can update your Facebook and Linked In status updates. I just learned that you can update your Facebook fan page status as well. Including delayed posting, which I have been wanting in Facebook Fan Pages
  • iPhone App
    • Going live Dec. 10th, Hoot Suite will have it’s own app that you can manage many of the things I have mentioned via the iPhone.

If you are in marketing or a business that uses a lot of social media,  I would recommend you getting Hoot Suite and giving it a try. Go directly to their site and sign up at http://www.hootsuite.com

Tim is the founder of Element33. A social media agency specializing in education, management and strategy for small businesses. He comes from a traditional marketing agency but has embraced all things digital. He considers himself a marketing nerd and believes that all marketing is tied together. This means no matter what silo you are in, social, email, seach, etc, changes in one will affect the other!

Leave a Reply