Introduction:
If you’re looking to improve your Twitter game, then you may want to look into Hootsuite. This social media tool is designed to help you manage all of your Twitter activity more effectively, with features that make everything from scheduling posts to tracking metrics a breeze. In this article, we’ll explore some of Hootsuite’s best features, and show you how you can use them to gain an edge on the competition.
Section 1: Scheduling Posts:
One of the biggest benefits of Hootsuite is the ability to schedule posts in advance. This means that you can sit down for an hour or two each week and draft all of your tweets for the week ahead, and then let Hootsuite handle the rest. You can specify exactly when each tweet will be published, so you can ensure that your content is being shared at the most effective times of day.
Section 2: Managing Multiple Accounts:
If you’re using Twitter to promote multiple businesses, projects, or personal brands, then Hootsuite is an absolute lifesaver. You can manage multiple Twitter accounts within the same dashboard, and switch back and forth between them with just a few clicks. This makes it easy to keep track of all your activity without having to switch between different browser windows or apps.
Section 3: Analytics and Reporting:
Hootsuite also offers detailed analytics and reporting that allow you to track your Twitter performance over time. You can view metrics such as follower growth, engagement rates, and click-through rates, and see how these metrics are changing over time. This information can help you identify which types of content are resonating with your audience, and which ones may need some tweaking.
Section 4: Collaborating with a Team:
If you’re managing a Twitter account as part of a team, then Hootsuite can simplify your workflow significantly. You can add team members to your account and grant them specific permissions, such as the ability to draft and publish posts, or access to analytics data. This makes it easy to collaborate on content creation and ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Conclusion:
Overall, Hootsuite is an incredibly powerful tool for anyone looking to make the most of their Twitter presence. With features like post scheduling, account management, analytics, and team collaboration, it has everything you need to dominate the platform and take your social media game to the next level. So if you haven’t already, give it a try – you won’t be disappointed!
If you are unfamiliar with Hootsuite, it is a very feature-rich web based Twitter client. Their tag line is “The Professional Twitter Client”. This is very true. It has a great number of configurations and options which make managing one or multiple Twitter accounts very easy. Many of its features are pretty appealing to big businesses who use it, of which, there are some pretty big names listed on the Hootsuite homepage.
I personally do not use the desktop application, so I am going to talk about the web version.
Tabbed Windows
First off, it has tabbed windows just like most web browsers. This feature alone is a great reason to try it. The tab feature allows for multiple accounts to be monitored with multiple columns per tab. If you are monitoring anything, this is really a time saver.
The columns can be a group, search, account timeline or keyword tracking. If you’d like to track your business or a product you are selling, you can set up an entire tab full of columns dedicated for that. I use the group function to track people I follow in the technology field. It is a lot easier to see what they are saying if they are separated from the herd.
Drag and Drop Ease
Drag and drop rearranging of tabs and columns makes it super easy to arrange things in an order which make the most sense to you. This is a great advantage if you have more columns than screen space. For example, you don’t always need to see your pending tweets column. If it was one of the first columns you created, by default it is near the front. Simply grab it and drag it to the end of the line. If you need it again, you can scroll over to the end of the row to take a peek at it.
Users
This is a feature geared more towards businesses or a group needing multiple users for the same account. If you want to give employees or other people access to update on your account, this is a great way to do that. The account owner becomes the administrator for the account. Each person has their own log in and password, yet the admin can choose what accounts the person can post to and also cancel their account if needed. In each separate account, the user can select to have their initials automatically added to each tweet. This helps differentiate who is sending what.
URL Shortener
The built in URL shortener saves the step of having to go to a different site or use a third party service to shrink the long URL you are posting. If you see a link with http://ow.ly/ then some letters and numbers, that’s a link from Hootsuite. Another benefit you receive from using the on board shortener, is click tracking.
Stats
If you have ever been curious how many people are clicking on the links you tweet, the built in tracking of all the ow.ly URLs. Its great for businesses or really anyone who wants to see how engaging they are to their followers. Below are a few of the different style graphs.
Here are a couple other graph views
Scheduled Tweets
This is a cool feature that helps you still appear active, yet allows you to not be tethered to your computer. You can schedule tweets for minutes, days or months ahead. If you wish to be notified when the scheduled tweet is sent. If you are scheduling a bunch of tweets, it’s not be a bad idea to have a column dedicated to pending tweets.
Bookmarklet
The bookmarklet allows for tweeting and delayed tweeting without having the Hootsuite page open all the time. When you click the bookmarklet, a window pops up. In the window (after you sign in) will be a shortened link, the name of the site and a description of the site. If you would like to send it right then, just hit send. If you’d like to schedule it, click schedule and pick the date and time you want the update sent. You can also receive a notification when the tweet is sent.
Embeded Columns
I haven’t see any other Twitter clients offer this. (Maybe I over looked it.) Hootsuite makes it super easy to embed the stream of tweets from one of your columns. To do this click the [<>] symbol. A box will pop up asking for the title, dimensions you’d like the window to be and how often you want the stream to refresh. After you click the grab code button, the code is generated. Just copy and paste that to your website per the instuctions and your done.
Does this web application have enough for you to ditch your desktop Twitter client?
Trevor is a freelance writer covering topics ranging from the Android OS to free web and desktop applications. When he is not writing about mobile productivity, He is coaching and playing the world’s greatest game… Soccer.
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