How to use Hootsuite for Your Business

Today is going to be a busy day. Webcast sponsored by Omniture and Digg at 10, marketing meeting at 11, lunch plans at 12, and so on.

If your company is implementing a social media strategy, you've probably already realized the importance of monitoring social media outlets such as Twitter. Although some people dismiss social media because it's so difficult to measure the ROI, I still fully believe in the importance of social technology for businesses. As long as you're not sitting in front of Tweetdeck and tweeting all day, my theory is that regularly monitoring social media for your company can only work to your benefit.

Every single day I see tweets about businesses- tweets that express joy, excitement, despair and frustration over certain products. The average # of followers of the people following me on Twitter is about 500, so let's pretend that's the average # of followers most Twitterers have. Imagine- that's 500 people who are scanning their Twitter homepages and associating those positive/negative words with YOUR company name!

Anyways, this isn't a post to promote Twitter. Where I was going with this is that today is going to be an exceptionally busy day, and I probably won't have as much time to monitor & send out tweets.

This is where Hootsuite comes in. Hootsuite, if you aren't already familiar with it, is a professional Twitter platform that allows you to manage multiple profiles, preschedule tweets, measure the stats of your tweet links & view all your direct msgs/mentions/sent/scheduled tweets at once. Just this week, Hootsuite won the Best Twitter App award in Mashable's  Open Web Awards - Social Media Edition (previous winners include Facebook, Pandora, Youtube).


Getting started with Hootsuite is easy:

Simply create your Hootsuite account, and start adding your multiple Twitter accounts in when prompted.



Monitor Mentions, Retweets, Sent Tweets and Direct Messages from one Dashboard:

At the top, you can choose which profile you want to send each tweet through. Right below the tweet text box, there's a convenient URL shortener. Right under that, there are different tabs for each of your Twitter profiles. Click a tab and you'll see that on a single screen, you can see your Home feed, your Mentions, your Sent Tweets, your Pending (scheduled) Tweets and your Direct Messages.

By monitoring certain Keywords and the tweets that mention your business, you'll learn what customers are looking for, what your current customers are frustrated by and identify trends to help you innovate your product or service.



The best thing about Hootsuite is the ability to Schedule Tweets.

You can schedule the exact time to send out each tweet. This is particularly useful for busy days where you just don't have time to log into Twitter. Some social media writers actually schedule their tweets days in advance, and only log in occasionally to respond to questions and mentions. If you have press releases, product announcements and blog posts that you want to share with your followers throughout the week, simply schedule them in advance.



Towards the bottom is the Stats feature, another one of the most important features of Hootsuite.

With this feature, you can see how many times your links have been clicked each day. Now, notice that although I've been using Hootsuite for a while now, there are only stats from the 15th- this is because prior to the 15th, I was still using BudURL. Remember that if you want Hootsuite to track your link clicks, always use the ow.ly shortener provided. Now you can see which of your blog posts/announcements are the most popular and best attract viewers back to your site.


You can track your Most Popular Tweets:








You can view Referral and Regional Stats to see where your readers are clicking in from:






















To see the full potential of Hootsuite for your social media strategy, I'd suggest you just dive in and start exploring. You can even update Facebook and LinkedIn from Hootsuite.



On a  last note, the Hootsuite for iPhone App was just released, and today's the last day to get a special 33% off.


With the new Hootsuite iPhone App and Red Oak Technologies'  Central Desktop iPhone App, you can now manage your social media, company buzz, Tasks, Workspaces, Events and  Calendars right from your iPhone! And even more great news - the 3rd party Central Desktop mobile app now works on Droid Phones. :)  Enjoy!