Social Media Tools - Hootsuite

By: Joseph Kiefer

For the past couple of months I have been researching and experimenting with social media. Like many other individuals, I am realizing that the process of getting a presence in the social media universe is harder then one might think. I started out by creating the strategic marketing ideas blog and then signed up for accounts on Twitter (MarketingJuice) and Linked In (Joseph Kiefer). I will update you on progress on these fronts as I proceed.

As I was playing around I realized that there must be some tools in place to help marketers better utilize the more established social media sites. I did some Google searches and did some research on the social media sites themselves. I found a ton of information, but it did take some sifting through the data to find tools that seemed legitimate and helpful. One of the best sites that I found was oneforty.com.

Oneforty has a great directory of different social media tools and they are for a variety of sites including the big three of facebook, twitter and linked in. I read through some descriptions and user reviews, which were helpful as well and decided to test a couple out. Since I am pretty new to the social media community I was not looking for anything overly complicated, but I wanted to accomplish a couple of main goals: 1.) Tracking - is anyone clicking through on links that I post and 2.) easier content management.

Hootsuite.com was one of the tools I signed up for and it has been effective for the goals I was looking to accomplish. Hootsuite is a social media tool used for Twitter accounts and it is user friendly with some good functionality. It has the normal Twitter functionality built into the tool, but it makes the data easier to view. You can view your Home Feeds, Mentions and Direct Messages all in columns on your homepage. Other optional columns would be sent messages, sent tweets, pending tweets and favorite tweets. You can also tweet right from hootsuite and it has a ow.ly URL shortener available. Another feature that makes it a little easier to manage your account is the ability to schedule your tweets. You could schedule tweets out through next week if you wanted. Perhaps the biggest time save is the ability to manage multiple accounts. I only have two twitter accounts right now and it was already becoming a hassle to manage both accounts. Hootsuite allows you to flip back and forth between accounts with the click of a link.

The content management functionality would have made it worth using by itself, but I was also looking for tracking as well. Hootsuite does have tracking and depending on your needs it may be enough. Basically it will track the number of times a link is clicked on in your tweets. This was really all I was looking for at this point, but if I continue to further develop my social media accounts I am going to eventually want more in-depth tracking then that. A note to keep in mind if you try this out: it will only track the clicks if you create the link in hootsuite.

Hootsuite is just one of the many tools I am sure I will be trying out. Hopefully I will have a similar experience with all of them. iPhone apps are next on my list of social media tools to check out.