I love online tools. I experiment with several tools every week, but not many are very impressive. I always look for tools that can save me time and allow me to do several things at once. So with that thought: Wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that allowed you to monitor and update your Facebook page, fan pages, LinkedIn and Twitter all at the same time from within a web browser? I have been playing with a new tool for the last week. Actually, I signed up for the account about a year ago and never used it. The tool is called HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) and I am starting to like it…
How I am using it
HootSuite allows me to monitor a lot of information in one browser window:
- Both of my Twitter accounts
- My Facebook page
- My Facebook fan page
- My LinkedIn network
- Personalized Twitter searches so I can see when certain words are Tweeted
- Twitter lists so I can monitor conversations of specific ‘Tweeters”
More than just monitoring
- Save Time: With HootSuite I can type one message and have it appear on all on my social networks
- Keep it short: Twitters 140 character limit is hard to stay within when you copy long website urls. HootSuite will shrink those urls with a click on the mouse.
- Timely: Do you have information that needs to be provided on a particular day? at a particular time? Use the scheduling feature to schedule when you posts will be made on your various social networks.
- Statistics: HootSuite provides you with statistics on how many time your links were clicked on. I have used bit.ly before to do this ( I still love bit.ly!) But it is so convenient to have the tracking within HootSuite.
- There is a lot more HootSuite can do, but those are the highlights that I am using right now.
Choice
There are other tools like this available, but HootSuite is quickly become my tool of choice. Here are a few other tools to consider that I am using:
What are you using?
What tools to you using to build stronger relationships, monitor your brand, or increase the effectiveness of your communications?
I am President and Chief Evangelist for Vivid Image - a web design and social marketing firm located outside of Minneapolis, MN. 
Thanks for this post Steve. I use Hootsuite, but when I set it up, I never noticed that you could include pages. Just got it set up. Online life just got a little easier!
Thanks for the post. I am using Tweetdeck for the moment, but am also taking a look at different tools. It is nice now how Linkedin synchs with Twitter, and Facebook synchs with Twitter, but the Facebook to Twitter link sometimes gets funky since the character limit is different and it creates a link to the Facebook page, when a link to the source is there too. Still working on finding the right tool.