The Networking Blog

HootSuite seems like another social network web application. Well, it doesn’t have any killer features that you won’t find elsewhere, but it does have important features that make it a useful tool for networking

HootSuite is a web application that can be used for managing multiple accounts in multiple social networks. The most obvious is Twitter. You can manage many Twitter accounts, which makes it useful if you’re promoting many businesses in separate accounts.

I’m certain you aren’t impressed. There are loads of web applications, such as Brizzly, which enable multiple accounts, and lots of desktop applications such as Tweetdeck. The main advantage of HootSuite regarding Twitter is the ability to schedule tweets.

Scheduling of tweets is enabled for manual tweets as well as for automatic ones. Instead of instantly tweeting about all your blog posts, you can set HootSuite to have a minimal period of time between tweets. This is good for not coming too strong – a concept we’ve discussed over and over again, such as this post about befriending too soon in Facebook.

This way, your followers will see sporadic tweets even if they are automated. Yes, there’s an auto-tweeting plugin for Wordpress, but HootSuite can schedule, spread the tweets and also append different words to the links. This makes it much more friendly to your followers, giving also the automated tweets a personal touch, which is so needed in a world of too many Twitter Autopilots.

LinkedIn, Facebook and more

HootSuite isn’t only about Twitter. You can use it to control status updates in your Facebook profile, your Facebook pages and LinkedIn, the leading tool for business networking. I wonder if they’ll support Naymz in addition to LinkedIn.

Another feature that is available is an option to link it to Ping.fm which opens up more social networks, such as Yammer, MySpace, FriendFeed and more. I find this unnecessary, as you can easily lose control and lose the personal touch.

Does Twitter bring traffic?

That’s a good question that receives long discussion all over the web. While you can separately measure the traffic in your websites, HootSuite takes a different approach of measuring the clicks on the tweets themselves. You can see clicks by tweets, web pages and more.

I found that repeating the intro “New blog post” for automated tweets from blog posts tend to receive less clicks over time. Playing with different intros seemed to gain more traction. More click mean a better connection with the people who follow you, and a better chance of enlarging the network via retweets.

As aforementioned, HootSuite doesn’t have anything revolutionary, but it has a nice package of features. An excellent example for a trivial but useful feature is the “Hootlet” – it enables instantly tweeting about a webpage you like. Trivial? Sure. Exists elsewhere? Sure. Useful? Yes.

No big flaws

When preparing this review, I ran into this review on Twitip. Apart from the interesting review, many commented with criticism about the ow.ly shortening tool. This is the tool that HootSuite uses for shortening and for the useful stats. During my research, ow.ly worked flawlessly. So there;s no significant downside in HootSuite.

All in all, it’s a useful tool for networking, free to try and free to use.