Nuvota

On a regular basis I will review tools that help you with your social media, marketing or entrepreneurial efforts.

Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the social networking tools out there? I certainly do! It requires a lot of time and energy to stay on top of all your social networking profiles on the web – be they business or personal: status updates, tweets, replies, mentions and so forth.

This is where a productivity tool such as Hootsuite comes in very handy. Hootsuite originally started out as a Twitter productivity tool, but has integrated Facebook and Linkedin in the last couple of months. It is a free web-based application (you don’t have to download anything – just sign in to their website) that lets you to manage your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn activities in one place. It also lets you integrate with ping.fm.
The image below is a screenshot of my Hootsuite profile:

Click on image to enlarge

There are four key sections that help you manage your Hootsuite account.

1. Status Update Bar:

Here you can enter status updates that you would like to post to your different social networking profiles. Two great features include the URL Shortener and Schedule Later.

The URL Shortener allows you to shorten a standard, longer URL into a much shorter link (e.g. http://nuvota.com/2009/12/12/how-to-create-a-social-media-marketing-plan/ becomes http://ow.ly/SF8O). This is especially useful for social media tools such as Twitter that limit the number of characters (140) for status updates.

Schedule Later lets you set up updates in advance and schedule them out over the day (or week and months). This way, you can dedicate a specific amount of time (for example 30 minutes at the beginning of a day) to research and post status updates. You’ll be “online” all the time without having to manually update your status every hour.

2. Social networking profiles

Here you can see what social networks you have integrated into your Hootsuite account. Every time you send out an update, you can select which of your social networking profiles should post the update. This allows you to adapt to different updating schedules of social networks. Facebook, for example, requires less status updates to be effective than Twitter.

3. Customizable Tabs

The tab section allows you to add as many tabs as you want and allows for complete customization. Within each tab, you are able to add up to six columns. For Facebook and Linkedin, the type of columns you can create is still somewhat limited. The two columns you can create are updates from your network and pending updates that you have scheduled. For your Twitter account, however, you have a multitude of options such as keyword based columns, group columns, mentions (someone mentions you on Twitter) and more. This tabbed layout allows you to place filters on the wealth of information you receive, and streamlines the information based on your specifications (e.g. I only want to see tweets that mention social media).

4. Sitemap

Besides the dashboard that you see in the screenshot, Hootsuite provides you with two additional views: Stats and Settings.

Settings allows you to add additional social networking profiles to your account, set your preferences and add additional account administrators to your Hootsuite profile. This last feature lets you give someone else authorization to manage your social networking profiles, which is great if you have several employees managing your social media efforts.

The Stats feature is one of the key reasons I use Hootsuite. By using the Hootsuites URL Shortener, Stats allows me to see how many people have clicked on the links that I send out in my updates. It shows me the number of clicks per message, and it gives me a list of click sources (Facebook, Linkedin etc. as well as geography). This feature allows you to gauge the popularity of certain topics, which is very useful for blog post creation and new product development.

All in all, I think Hootsuite is a very user-friendly and intuitive tool that makes managing your social networking efforts much easier. It allows you to save time on a day-to-day basis and helps you data mine information. The one drawback I see is the limited functionality for Linkedin and Facebook columns. However, I predict that Hootsuite will release new features in 2010 that address this concern.