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.

About a decade ago, a friend bragged about a new phone he just bought, that can hold up to 300 contacts in his address book. This sounds funny when thinking about it in 2009. He then showed me that except for name and phone number you can type in additional details such as city, birthday and mail. To demonstrate the abilities of the new gadget (I remind the readers this is 1999 we are talking about) he showed me a memo the phone just made about one of his customers. The customer’s daughter just turned 16, and my friend called to congratulate his customer for the sweet sixteen birthday party they are holding. We can learn 2 things from this ‘ancient’ story:

1. Know your customers – they will return a favor by doing business with you again.
2. In 2009 there is no need to input your phone manually, we have technology for that!

Before reviewing the possibilities with advanced mobile devices such as Iphone and Blackberry, lets take a closer look at Facebook and LinkedIn and their immediate business added value. Befriending online with business associates and customers, but not too soon, can let you take part in their lives. Choose to use it wisely, and you will enjoy a constant and fruitful relationship with your clients. Instead of relating to your business alone, you can connect to your clients about their personal interests, hobbies and important events such as birthdays, anniversaries and other social gatherings.

In the past, you would keep logs or lists of customers, birthday details and addresses that would consume a lot of time to manage. Today, Facebook has an application for almost every smartphone: Blackberry,Iphone, HTC, etc. that will notify you with important dates related to your connections. The new Facebook app for Blackberry, can connect automatically to your calendar and address book.  Twitter has also hundreds of applications for almost every existing phone. LinkedIn can also be used from most phones.

We are not always near a desktop, or a notebook, but if we can see what our business connections are up to, or what they are celebrating, we can choose to use it. We can make a call to congratulate an associate on receiving an award, text a client on his birthday and send an email with an article that would interest a customer that just tweeted on the subject. All these options are easy to use today, and were not available 3-4 years ago. All the examples I’ve mentioned can be available using notifications on Facebook mobile applications, and any Twitter app such as the popular Tweetdeck (on Iphone also). The Tweetdeck, by the way, has a new version that includes feeds not only from twitter as before, but also facebook, myspace and linkedin, which means you can enjoy your feeds and text from all those applications in one place. An advantage for all those having a hard time following Facebook, Twitter and linkedin togather.

Even if social media doesn’t interest you that much, you should still consider it as a working tool for you. LinkedIn can be your professional database, Facebook can be your clients’ event notifier and Twitter even just for short and immediate direct messaging to clients.

For a kick start:

facebook latest app for Blackberry

Tweetdeck for Iphone

Linkedin on mobile

Spam- by David, on Flickr.

Joining a LinkedIn group gives you the opportunity to communicate with other members of the group and also to post your content there. My associate was thrilled to find another place to put links to his site.

While this can indeed be a nice platform for receiving quality traffic, from a well targeted group of professionals, this approach doesn’t always satisfy the group administrators.

The big mistake that he did was not to read the rules. The group rules strictly stated no links! I believe that if you’re a veteran member of such a group, and you make such a sin as leaving a link in the discussion board, you’ll probably be forgiven.

Well, my associate was not only hasty not to read the rules, but posted the link within hours of joining the group. This behavior was considered spammy by the group’s administrator, that used the strongest possible sanction: a ban from the group.

Not only did my associate lose his chance to post links there, he’ll have a much harder time to network with the group’s members, now that he’s sitting in the corner.

The lesson to everybody is: Don’t come too strong! This lesson is good for LinkedIn groups as well as for other social media sites and for face to face meetings. Take things gradually. Don’t push your counterpart…

Further reading: Keith Swenson writes about a new kind of spam in LinkedIn groups.

How do you join groups? First thing, decide what are your fields of interests are. What does your business do? Real-estate, law, consulting? In almost any subject you’ll find groups and subgroups with many professionals in them. People (like you) on each group are looking to hire, talk and write on the selected topic. In other words, people are looking to connect – to network.

Groups Search on LinkedIn

Once you join a group, you can get noticed by participating in conversations. You can get notified by mail on conversations that interest you. You can start a conversation yourself. You could approach people by leaving a comment on conversations, sending a message, and eventually becoming their connections on LinkedIn.

Here are some of the groups I found useful and with great contacts, that I joined lately:

Social Media Today – All about the world of social media, tactics, conversations and the people of the relatively new industry. The group is a part of the Social Media Today website. Recent conversations are about social media for businesses, legal issues on social media and etc. I found the group very effective and useful. The people participating there are pros, have great insights and some of them became my connections.

The Blog Zone – A group for bloggers- a group all about blogs, bloggers, blog content. One of its subgroups is The Bloggers Bulletin. This is a blog platform hosting a few bloggers and their content on a variety of topics.

Business Development – A group with discussions on sales, producing revenue and business development for companies.

Search for groups that interest you, and start being active. The networking will happen by itself.

Advantages:

1. Search Engine Strength: Naymz does very well in search engines. This is very important for reputation management. When someone looks you up on Google or Yahoo and finds content that you control, this helps your personal branding. Naymz content also helps push down web mentions of yourself that you’d prefer not be seen or emphasized. This is definitely the No. 1 reason to sign up for Naymz.
2. Free introductions: Introductions to people that you have no connection to are limited in LinkedIn, and aren’t totally free. In Naymz, it’s all free.
3. Reputation Monitor: Naymz supplies a tool for reputation monitoring across the web, scanning social networks and blogs. This is both interesting and useful.
4. Microblogging: Naymz offers status messages similar to Facebook and fast growing Twitter. This way, Naymz is somewhere between chaotic Twitter and intra-corporation Yammer. It can be quite useful.

Disadvantages:

1. Size: Naymz boasts that it has over one million users. This is enough for signing up, but LinkedIn is much bigger (over 45 million people) and is a synonym with Professional Networking site.
2. Anonymous recommendations: While being anonymous is necessary in some spooky cases, when you’re building your reputation, an identified recommendation is better than an anonymous. Would you trust a faceless person when networking or when hiring someone?
3. Premium Services: While also LinkedIn has premium services, one of these services is disturbing – the detailed visitor tracking. It means that only users that paid Naymz will get to see who visited their profile. This privacy issue doesn’t make me feel so comfortable – I don’t want the user to see that I’ve visited his profile. Also MyBlogLog has the same disadvantage that disturbs many bloggers.
4. No Groups: LinkedIn groups are an excellent and useful feature, that draws me to the site again and again. Naymz doesn’t have this feature, and I find it to be a big disadvantage.

I hope that Naymz will grow and get better. In the meantime, having a profile there is great for reputation management, but still not the best tool for networking.

Read more on how to use LinkedIn.