HootSuite for Publishers
March 4, 2010
HootSuite is a full-featured, easy-to-use Twitter application that gives internet magazine publishers abilities which make it the ideal tool for managing the Twitter part of their publishing process.
Note: This post isn’t intended to be tutorial, but rather a short list of the reasons why HootSuite is a Twitter app worth looking at if you have in-depth Twitter management needs for your publication.
What is HootSuite?
HootSuite is a web-based application (versus a desktop application that you download and install on your computer or device), that gives you the ability to send Twitter posts, follow others’ twitter streams, create lists and set filters for content published on Twitter. You can also manage multiple accounts from HootSuite if you have more than one account. A magazine editor for instance, might have an individual account through which she shares her more personal tastes and interests, but she might also manage her publication’s primary stream. Being able to manage this in the same application using familiar browser-like tabs is rather handy.
HootSuite does what many of the other leading Twitter apps do—TweetDeck and Seesmic come to mind. But where HootSuite excels is in the control it gives over Twitter content in ways that a metrics-driven organization needs to measure the efficacy of their campaigns.
Separating the Tweet from the Chaff
One of HootSuite’s great features, and the one that got us to start using it in the first place, is its filtering abilities. Creating a column in HootSuite’s interface is a dead simple three-step process that can give you as targeted or broad catch-net as you want for absolutely any topic that’s being talked about on Twitter. Just click the Add Column button, enter your parameters, click “Create Column” and you’re off.
They’ve also recently added the ability to filter on streams coming from other social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Ping.fm, so you can stay on top of multi-channel streams from a single interface.
This isn’t unique, of course, other Twitter applications will let you do this, but since HootSuite is a web-app, you can access it from almost any browser. They’ve even launched apps for iPhone and, very recently, for Android too.
This filtering ability is particularly useful if you want to follow particular discussions using keywords or hashtags (those little one word phrases that begin with a hash symbol #) or even if you want to set a filter for your organization’s name or products. It gives you a way to stay in touch with what people are saying about your brand and its goods in near real time. Pretty valuable, especially since you can get into the conversation and engage one-on-one about those things. People like that.
Weighing in
Another native ability of HootSuite is the ability to look at statistics about your Twitter posts and how popular they are. You have the ability to view an aggregate summary of how well your stream is doing as a whole, or drill down to get a view of how popular individual posts have been. This is an incredibly useful feature for determining what post constructions are having an impact with your followers, or what keywords are eliciting the best responses. It’s a great tool for A/B type testing (or as close as you can get with Twitter), giving you the ability to track which approaches are working best.
The catch here is that you have to use HootSuite’s native Ow.ly link generator to build statistics. Ow.ly is a link shortener function that reduces the size of long links to something that fits better in the 140 character maximum posting length. The added benefit of the service is that it also tracks click-throughs, which is what we’re talking about here.
Most people don’t mind this, but I’ve heard some HootSuite users complain that the Ow.ly browser bar that appears when an Ow.ly link is clicked is a nuisance. I’ve heard others complain that the Ow.ly service seems take ‘ownership’ of the link it generates despite the fact that users can turn the bar off. In either case, it’s a small tradeoff for those who value the ability to measure their campaigns.
If Ow.ly doesn’t cut it for you, you can always use the Bit.ly which also generates very useful stats, much like Ow.ly. The trouble there is that if you want to use an external link shortener, you have to leave the HootSuite UI to get the link and then copy and paste it into your field. Cumbersome. There are other link shortening services that you can use too, but the same applies, and some may not have static generating abilities.
Time, please!
What I like best about HootSuite, and it’s something that TweetDeck doesn’t do, is that it allows you to post to Twitter at preset times. This is what sets HootSuite apart from most other Twitter clients.
There are a couple of key reasons why this is an advantage.
The first reason is that for an organization’s Twitter manager, the ability to write 6 or 12 tweets all at once and have them posted at intervals throughout the day is huge. Spending a few minutes creating those posts in the morning and have them published while they’re doing other things is liberating. It keeps the stream active, giving the impression that its being populated all day long, but doesn’t interfere with spontaneous posting which Twitter is best known for. They don’t have to be posting all day long to appear as though they are.
The second, and perhaps more important reason, is that Twitter users (myself included), don’t like being bombarded with 12 posts from a single account at the same time. One of my favorite magazines dumps 5, 7 or sometimes 10 consecutive posts into their stream often enough that it drives me a little crazy. I love the magazine, so I don’t complain. But I’ve lost followers on Twitter because I’ve had too itchy a Twitter finger at times. And I’ve stopped following others for the same reason.
Another benefit is that if your publishing schedule is extremely rigid, the ability to co-ordinate Twitter posts with HootSuite’s timed posting will be a real advantage to both your organization and its followers.
At any rate, check out HootSuite. It’s free and gives you great control.
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