There is no question if you have become a social media fool like many of us or at least me, you need a system to help you manage your social networks. TweetDeck has been the vehicle of choice for many of us. However, last week someone put me on to Hootsuite. Well, it only took me a couple of days to become a loyal fan.
Here’s Why!
Hootsuite offers the ability to view lists as streams, it can create and organize your streams, reorder them and them filter. It offers themes and stats. It updates multiple steams/sites and accounts all at once. You can upload photos, schedule tweets and shrink links.
The free version offers you up to 5 profiles, some basic analytics and 2 RSS feeds.
You can upgrade for $5.99 a month, offering you unlimited profiles and RSS feeds. For me at this point the free version works just fine.
For the most part TweetDeck and Hootesuite are identical tools but Hootesuite brings a few features to the equation that pushes it to the top of the list for me.
It provides statistics.
Hootesuite offers the option to monitor your tweets, including retweets and click-throughs. Do you tweet, send them out into cyperspace and wonder if anyone saw it. Of course, you can gauge it on some level by the number of retweets but if you really want to know how many actually clicked through to read the post, HooteSuite can offer you just this. Now I can actually measure how twittering is working for me.
It is also very easy to see who are the influencers in your Twitter Network and measure your own influence. Hootsuite uses KLOUT to give you a quick snapshot of a Twitter user’s influence.
The Klout score measures your online influence. The scores range from 1 to 100. Klout uses over 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability and Network Score.
You can read more about how these are measured an evaluated at Klout.
For instance, my score analysis is 32; Klout says I am effectively using social media to influence my network. My network influencer is 46; meaning I am capturing the attention of influencers in my network. My amplification probability is 15, the probability that my content will be acted upon in the form of retweets, clicks through and comments, and my Reach score is 65, I have a small tightly interactive network. All these numbers gives me a picture of how I am utilizing Twitter. Overall Klout considers me an Explorer, meaning I am learning the lay of the land and making it work for me. I have to agree with them there.
Information is knowledge and with HootSuite statistics, you now have the knowledge to leverage twitter to be more effective for you.
The other tool that I love is the tabs. The tabs make it very simple to organize your various streams as well as your various social networks. With tabbed browsing, you have multiple windows in one browsing screen. You get a lot of information on the screen at once allowing you to hide what you are not looking at. This allows HooteSuite to load faster, when you click on one of the tabs the new information loads.
If you have not chosen a tool for organizing your social network or if you have not taken Hootsuite for test drive I encourage you to do so. The learning curve is short and the benefits many.
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