Using Hootsuite to Create a Rich Social Media Dashboard

I have been consulting with clients about the virtues of Hootsuite for some time now and have decided to create a walk through on how to set up hootsuite and how to use it to aggregate your social media updates and to monitor the twitter fire hose of information.

Hootsuite is a powerful twitter client that allows you to customize the twitter streams you see to get the data FAST. Think of it like the ultimate web based Twitter Dashboard.

In the video I run through the initial set up. I then dive deep into how to use the tabs, columns, different search strings, how to autopost rss feeds and why you should be doing so.

Using HootSuite to Create a Rich Social Media Dashboard from David Wells on Vimeo.

Benefits to using Hootsuite

• The ability to aggregate your social media networks
• Use it as a url shortening service
• Tracking clickthrough stats on shortened urls
• Scheduling out Tweeting/status updates for campaigns
• Auto feeding rss content into your twitter, facebook or Linkedin profile
• Ping.FM intergration allowing for syndication across 50+ social media sites…
• Easily sharing with the bookmarklet/browser plugins
• Easy access across multiple computers due to it being web based
• Derr…. It’s FREE (for the time being)
• AND now Wordpress blog integration announced today Jan 6th 2010

What about other twitter clients?

What makes Hootsuite better than tweetdeck and its counterparts is the ability to lay out the information in a tab like format. The tabs give the ability to set up multiple custom twitter search queries that makes for an amazing twitter listening platform.

One of the tabs I use in my hootsuite (as explained in the video) is a Q&A tab. This allows me to search anyone talking about social media, marketing, seo, or ppc in twitter. The search queries look like this:

• “marketing ? -http” (the -http takes out people linking to things and leaves only questions)
• “social media ? -http”
• “Your brand” ? -http
• “Your competitors brand”
• etc. (there are so many ways you can do this. I explain in the video at the 3:28 mark)

Remember a core principle of social media is GIVING before you get anything

I would highly recommend setting up certain tabs with phrases and questions that relate to your industry. Believe me people are shouting into twitter with questions ALL the time. If you can send them a quick answer they will thank you for it and most likely follow you, maybe even refer a friend to you for help. (WHAT? A business lead on twitter? perposterious!)

While there is an iphone application for hootsuite currently available, I can imagine that an android counterpart is soon to come.

Using Hootsuite as a social media dashboard

So what are you waiting for?

Go use it and stop complaining that you don’t understand twitter. It’s 2010 for Gods sake!