Tip of the Week: Hootsuite

[tweetmeme] So my tip of this week is Hootsuite, a fantastic Twitter client that allows you to manage various profiles (including Facebook, Linked In, WordPress and others). It can be used as your only Twitter client, but as I still favour Tweetdeck for that, I primiarly use it to schedule tweets. The reason I do this is because I listen and scan content in one hit. Which means if I find stuff I want to share with my Twitter following and did it as I found it, they’d get a bunch of tweets at the same time. Which could be frustrating (and a little spammy). So instead I spread them out during the day. Hootsuite makes it easy to do this by providing a handy widget called the Hootlet.

You can drag this into your bookmark and then when you find a blog post or web page you want to share with the world, hit the Hootlet and the Hootsuite window will pop up.

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The title of the post and the link will appear and you can then choose which profiles you want to share it to.

As you can see, I have Twitter, Facebook and Linked In set up so I could share it to all three. You can send immediately, however if you click on Send Later you can schedule it to publish at a later time. When going through my RSS reader and reading the various posts, I try to only share one every half an hour as I feel more could be too much. But you do what’s right for you.

I also use the scheduling function inside of Hootsuite by setting up various columns (through Twitter lists) of things I find interesting. I then spend a bit of time going through these and sharing what I find useful. Again, the scheduling function allows me to spread this out rather than sharing the lot in one go.

Hootsuite also allows you to see which of these links share are the most popular through the stats it provides.

This shows the links I’ve sent out in the last 7 days and gives great insight into what people genuinely find interesting. For me this is key as I want to understand my audience and give them what they want. It’s all about relevancy. You can also review these stats over various timespans, looking back over a few months if you need to. The stats function also shows you information by region and referral, again very useful to see where your audience is (both on and offline).

So there you have it. I hope you find it useful. If you’re already using Hootsuite and you use it in other ways, I’d love you to share that in the comments below. I’m here to learn from you guys as well as impart my own knowledge.

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