After a lot of convincing from a few friends that are even bigger social media geeks I decided to give HootSuite a try. I’ve been a Tweetdeck guy for a long time now so had no plans on defecting. I can honestly say that HootSuite has finally made my day-to-day social media life significantly better.
Just to be clear – this is not a sponsored post. HootSuite hasn’t contacted me to write this and they aren’t giving me a dime to write this article. I never thought I would write an article about a social media tool like this but given the impact it’s had on my daily life, I thought it was only fair to share this with all of you.
So what do I like so much about HootSuite?
First – it is unbelievably easy to setup and use. It took me about five minutes to load my main social media profiles into the system and everything just worked from that point on. I really like that I can manage Twitter, Facebook, Facebook pages, and just about any other social media account you might have all from one service.
Of course you can manage a million social media accounts using Tweetdeck however since it’s an application rather than a website you need to install the app on every computer and device that you own. Unfortunately I’ve found that Tweetdeck crashes like crazy on my iPhone 4 and won’t install properly on my brand-new Macbook Pro.
Hootsuite hasn’t crashed yet and it makes it so easy to switch between social media accounts and easily view the information that I reference on a daily basis – this means things like @mentions, direct messages, and search phrases. My favorite feature is that each one of my social media accounts gets its own tab with its own set of columns that I define. In the screenshot at the top you’ll see the tab for a blog that Daina and I run called Blog About Wine. For this particular Twitter account I am interested in following #wine and seeing what’s going on in the wine world on Twitter.
I can access this tab and instantly interact with my BlogAboutWine Twitter account, but then, just as easily I can switch to @MorganLinton and have a completely different set of tabs, in the case of that account I monitor the search term Domaining.
So what does this have to do with Domaining?
You might not think that HootSuite would have anything to do with Domaining – but it does, and it will more and more each year. If you view your domain names as brands then every one of your brands should have a corresponding Twitter and Facebook account. If you want to update these regularly you need to manage them in one place and HootSuite makes it really easy to do this.
Now let’s go a layer deeper. We all care about traffic and it’s no secret that social media can drive strong traffic. Couple this with the fact that Google and Bing are giving more and more value to social media links and you can quickly see how social media can help you really take your domains and their traffic to the next level.
If you are looking at your domain portfolio and trying to figure-out how to turn all those vacant names into real brands, social media should be a key part of your branding strategy. As Domainers though we’re bound to have multiple brands and HootSuite makes it easy to manage the social media side of those brands all in one place.
So if you haven’t tried HootSuite yet give it a shot. They have a free trial and if you’re starting to experience social media overload this could help you regain control and help make your brands more social!
