There are plenty of great Twitter desktop applications out there, and everyone swears by their favorite, whether it's TweetDeck, Twhirl, Twitterific or others. Some still even prefer old-school tweeting from Twitter.com on their browser.
If you're using Twitter to drive traffic to a blog or web site, or if your organization has a number of people on Twitter and wants to get a grip on how the microblogging site is being used (as well as its impact), you might want to check out a platform called
HootSuite.
I've been using HootSuite for the past month or so. It has several nice features that have kept me coming back, and this week added even better features.
Getting started on HootSuite is easy. There's nothing to download. All you do is provide your email address, name and a password to create an account. Then you can add one or more Twitter profiles to the account by providing the Twitter user names and passwords. (HootSuite emails you a confirmation code that you cut-and-paste into a dialog box.)
Once you do that you're taken to a dashboard that shows you tweets from all the profiles you've added. A dropdown box at the top allows you to zero in on specific profiles. About one-third down the page is the 140-character box for you to type in your tweets.
Here's where it gets really good. HootSuite has its own URL shortener, right below the tweet box. It makes URLs even shorter than the popular
TinyURL. A typical TinyURL is 25 characters long. HootSuite's ow.ly URL is 17 characters. As veteran Twitter users know, those extra eight characters can make a big difference.
The ow.ly URL serves another purpose. It allows you to get near real-time click-through stats for your tweets that include ow.ly URLs. You can see stats for an individual tweet by going to a specific Twitter profile, clicking the "Sent" tab in the middle of the page, and then clicking on a small bar-graph icon on the far right of the tweet.
If you want to get total tweet stats for the day, week, month or year, click on the "Stats" tab to the right of the "Send" tab. Up pops a line graph that gives you daily totals as you mouse over. Pretty cool.
(For those using Google Analytics to check Referring Sites, you'll see ow.ly listed as a source. Those are Twitter referrals via HootSuite. Add them to the twitter.com numbers in GA to get a Twitter referral total.)
HootSuite also has a feature that allows you to schedule tweets by using a "Send Later" button right below the tweet box.
One of the new features HootSuite added this week is great if you're interested in branding, getting retweets and making it easy for your content to be distributed. If readers click on the ow.ly URL in your tweet, not only will they see the page you linked, at the top of the page will be a banner that includes:
- Your Twitter icon
- A Share button providing easy access to 47 different social bookmarking sites (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.)
- A ReTweeting box
Take a look at the difference. Here's a
regular link to a Datamation column, and here's an
ow.ly link to the same column. That's right, I'm watching you. There's no escape. (Note: If you got to this blog post through the ow.ly link on my tweet or a RT and are wondering why the owl is there at the top left of this page and not my icon, beats me. I think I tried getting too clever; it's not HootSuite's fault.)
There's a lot more to HootSuite, which you can read about
here. I recommend giving it a try. If it's not for you, just go back to your old favorite.
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