I recently discovered a free online producted called HootSuite for managing Twitter posts and I have been very impressed! The summary from their web-site reads,
“HootSuite is the ultimate Twitter toolbox. With HootSuite, you can manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. HootSuite lets you manage your entire Twitter experience from one easy-to-use interface. “
I am using it for both my personal twitter account as well as our church’s. It is easy to set up and you can have many different twitter profiles that you might manage or contribute to. Think about personal, church, ministry, etc. You can simply click on which profile(s) you want to tweet from and yes you can select mulitple at once!
If you have a Twitter profile that muliple people should be allowed to tweet from, no problem! HootSuite gives you the ability to add users without you having to share the Twitter account’s login creditials – a good safe guard!
A couple of built in features I really like are the ability to pre-schedule your tweet and the URL shortener. When you click the “Send Later” link, you get an expanded window like you see below.
You can then pick the day and time you want the tweet to go out and if you want a confirmation email.
The URL shortener uses the “http://ow.ly”’ format. Here you see the connection to “hoot” and “owl” get it? Any way, while there are many and various URL shorteners available, what I like about this one is the built in stats integration with HootSuite.
Every time you create an ow.ly short URL, HootSuite will track it for you and report back some pretty cool statistics for you. See this example summary by day:
You can change this report to show you by day, week, month, or any date range you like. It is flexible and easy! But that is not all – you can also get it broken down by region (where people are from who click on your links) and by source (which site did they click on your link from). In HootSuite, when you hover over the graph it shows you the number assicated with each section.
Even more, HootSuite will tell you which of your ow.ly tweets had the most clicks:
And if this wasn’t enough, HootSuite will also allow you to easily import your blog RSS feed, so that new posts will be tweeted automatically from HootSuite with a ow.ly URL to your post! I have switched from TwitterFeed.com to HootSuite for this function.
Read more about HootSuite here and give it a try! You’ll be “hooting” in no time!