I recently read (well, listened to) a book/audiobook called "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" by David Meerman Scott. (GREAT book!) The book talks all about social media (blogs, social networks, etc.) and how they can be effectively used in marketing. I found it fascinating and overwhelming at the same time. There's so much out there now! Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube, blogging... not to mention social bookmarking like Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Delicious, and more. Up until reading this book, I was content with my comfortable knowledge of Facebook and Facebook alone, having seen Twitter and other services as a waste of my time.
Realizing, though, how quickly the world is moving into all of these types of services, I decided a few weeks ago to jump headlong into as many of these services as I could to see what they were all about. Hence, this blog, my new Twitter account, my Delicious bookmarks account, and more. I tested it out in my personal life, and am finally in the stages of slowly implementing it all into a Social Media Marketing plan at work.
Monitoring, tracking, and managing a brand's name out on the internet can be like trying to gather an entire class of 5-year-olds on the playground after they've each downed a Redbull. New posts, comments, blogs, and articles pop up every second, and anywhere and everywhere on the internet. In order to keep on top of buzz about a company or product, companies need to be able to find, take note of, and where applicable, respond to, posted media. After growing weary of spending hours a day trying to hunt down all the buzz about our product online, I embarked on a new journey: figure out a way to aggregate all of the social media information on the web into the simplest form possible.
I am by no means an expert in the field of social media marketing (on the contrary, I'm quite the newbie!) but on the technical side of it (monitoring, tracking, etc), I'm starting to feel pretty confident and figure I might share what I've learned so far. There's a lot, so I'm posting it in parts.
Part 1: Hootsuite - an all-in-one social networking client.
I use Hootsuite for our company to easily manage our Twitter account and Facebook page from one, easy-to-use interface. Hootsuite allows you to add multiple social networks to your account (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm) and manage them all from one place. You can type a post and select which account(s) you want it to post to. The interface is highly customizable and makes at-a-glance information from all your networks simple and refreshing.
Keyword Tracking
A powerful feature of Hootsuite that is particularly useful for companies is the ability to track keyword results from Twitter. For example, One of my columns (not in the image above, but on my business account) displays Twitter posts that contain our company name or products. Another column shows posts about competitors. You can choose how many column display (1-4) and which type of stream shows in each one.
Tabs
If you have a lot of networks and want detailed info from each one, you can keep organized with tabs. I have a main feed for our company that shows direct Twitter messages in the first column, Twitter mentions about our product in the second, etc. I then have a separate tab for detailed Facebook page info. In my personal account, I have a separate tabs for Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In all together.
Built-in URL Shortening and Tracking; Photo Uploading
Hootsuite allows for URL shortening right in the client, and can automatically shorten URLs you type to make it easier to post. Taking this one step further, however, Hoosuite will automatically track every shortened URL you send, and provide you with a chart of statistics about how many clicks each link received, and more! You can easily add photos to your posts as well, right from within Hootsuite.
Blog/RSS Sync
Hootsuite can sync with an RSS feed from a blog, and automatically post a message to your networks when you write a new entry. I have it set up, for example, to automatically send a message to my Facebook and Twitter accounts with the title and the shortened URL of a new blog post. Again, a great time-saver.
Price
Hootsuite is by far the best, most intuitive social networking client I've used (and I've tried a lot). What's the best part? It's free. You can't beat free.
Conclusion
If you use multiple services such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook regularly, you might want to check this out and see if you like it. While I do use it for personal use, Hootsuite makes its biggest contribution when I use it for business - to manage our company's social media presence.
Hootsuite is just one part of my personalized "Social Media Tracking Dashboard" that I've been building for our business. Next time I'll write about free tracking and charting tools that make it easy to see at-a-glance stats about your company's Twitter mentions and Forum/Blog posts.
MS
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