I started using HootSuite off and on a couple of weeks ago. HootSuite is a web interface that allows you to manage most of your Twitter activities.
Considering that I’ll be using Twitter a whole lot in the future, I thought it would be great to use some kind of Twitter console or dashboard that helped me schedule tweets as well as allowed for multiple people to tweet on my behalf without exposing them to my own username and password. Although I’m still deciding whether or not having someone else tweet for me is a good strategy or not (I’m leaning towards Yes, with some caveats), HootSuite seems good for a whole bunch of reasons:
1. Schedule your tweets.
This was a big plus for me. I wanted to pace tweets throughout the day instead of just in the evening between 7 and 10 which is really when I get online to work on my business. HootSuite handles this quite easily and very reliably (I recently tried a competitive product and it sent the tweet immediately, instead of when I had scheduled it).
2. Shrink URLs
You can shrink URLs right away without going to TinyURL or another site that does that. I’m pretty new to Twitter so maybe other products do that native to their product.
3. Manage several Twitter IDs.
Very useful considering I will be adding another Twitter ID for the stroller site in the next coming weeks. I haven’t tested it yet, but you can also tweet the same status from several profiles at once, which is convenient.
4. Hootlet toolbar
You can add the Hootlet toolbar to your browser, which allows you to quickly tweet on pages you are browsing. The flow of posting this way also allows for scheduling your tweet for later.
5. Add several editors
This feature was a big winning point for me. I liked the ability to create “editors” who could submit tweets for me, without revealing the username and password of the main profile. I won’t be having them create tweets (although I might get them to go through a set of blogs and tweet about posts within some set guidelines); instead, I’ll be drafting a bunch of tweets for them to schedule on my behalf. It also might be event-driven – i.e. they might post a tweet everyday about the latest post on my blog. Or new posts to the forums of the stroller site.
6. Track the performance of your tweets
I just re-read the feature list for this post and apparently HootSuite allows allows you to track your URL clickthrough stats. I didn’t find this feature very intuitive to use (hence I didn’t know it was there) or maybe I wasn’t looking for it because I didn’t need (or know I needed) it. Anyway, I can see how this feature is a value-add.
One downside is that I can’t add friends through the HootSuite dashboard. I suppose that’s ok since this isn’t Twitter afterall – it’s just a tool to make tweeting a bit easier.
Bottomline: if you are looking for a Twitter tool that can help you manage several profiles and allow many people to tweet on your behalf, check out HootSuite. It might be right up your alley.
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