Little Birdie Communications

This is the first of My Favorite (Online) Things posts. Enjoy!

While I love (LOVE) Twitter, I have a confession to make: I rarely go to twitter.com. Instead I prefer to use hootsuite.com to do my twittering. It turns a basic stream of updates into a much more powerful tool and recently added new features that sync my Facebook and Linked In accounts, making it more of an aggregator as well.

 Columns

I love being able to create columns to hold my updates. I have one for my favorites, most of them people in the business of social media whose Tweets I want to see right away. I have another for keyword searches, one for direct messages, and another for mentions.

 Search

Twitter is a great tool for monitoring what people are saying about you, your brand and your business. Hoot Suite does a great job with search. You can choose to search once or keep the search as a column, which will automatically update. I used this during the G-20 Summit, the Iran Election and to follow the Steelers and Penguins.

Many Accounts

This is one of my favorite features – I have one login for Hoot Suite, which logs me into every Twitter feed I’m responsible for. Twitter.com only allows me to log into one at a time. This multi-account feature allows me to send a tweet simultaneously on all accounts or to pick among them. I love that I only have to go to one place to do all of my tweeting – or updating other accounts (see Integration below).

 Integration

This is one of the newer features on Hoot Suite and made me love the site even more. Just a few weeks ago I could only login to Twitter accounts, but now I have access to Facebook, LinkedIn and Ping. Facebook not only allows me to link to my personal account but also to fan pages, which is a huge bonus. I can now update every account associated with one entity at the same time.

Scheduled Updates

Running a campaign on Twitter used to require me to schedule the updates on my calendar and then go to Twitter. Now I can schedule all of my updates at one time and Hoot Suite will send them for me. This is a really useful tool for a campaign but I also use it when I want to retweet something. Since most of my audience uses twitter during business hours I like to send my tweets out when they’ll have a better chance of being read. If it’s late at night I’ll simply schedule the tweet for the morning and presto! My followers have no idea I was twittering away in the wee hours of the morning.

Short URLS

A character limit of 140 may only be required on Twitter, but with all of our social networking sites synching updates it’s almost become universal. That means every character counts and long URLs are out. Short URLs are a must and really easy to create with Hoot Suite. Copy and paste your URL into the Short URL field and insert it into your post. Done!

Analytics

Analytics and Short URLs go hand in hand. Hoot Suite tracks every Short URL you create through their site and gives a graphic for every click you’ve received. You can tell which tweets and updates are the most popular, giving insight into your followers and helping you know what to keep tweeting about.

Web Browser & iPhone App

Hoot Suite is available for free at www.hootsuite.com. It is a web-based application so you can access it from any web browser. They released their iPhone app today and after 2 hours it was the #1 Social Media App. Time will tell how users respond to it, but if it’s as good as the online version it should be a useful tool.