It’s no secret we’re big fans of Hootsuite here, we use it everyday to make our lives easier and keep up with the dizzying world of Twitter. We teach about Hootsuite in our classes and I figured, hey, these are some great social media vocabulary words people should know. Some of these words are unique to Hootsuite and a couple are terms that can be applied to social media in general.
- Streams: Inside Hootsuite you can create handy little feeds in column form based on search terms, keywords, mentions, sent tweets, #hashtags, pending tweets, anything you want that has to do with your Twitter account or conversations you like. It makes it easy to divide up the noise and capture the information that is useful to you all in one pretty place.
- Hootlet: This is a nifty browser add-on that makes posting a link to any of your Hootsuite connected accounts as simple as a single click. The Hootlet takes the link and populates the tweet based on the information from page you are sharing and then automatically adds a short link. Select the accounts you want it shared to and send, the little box disappears and you’re done in about 5 seconds. This is great for sharing your own content too!
- Reply/ReTweet: Remember those streams we talked about? Well anything you see in there you can easily reply or retweet right inside Hootsuite. On each tweet there is a button for each of these activities and makes conversing extremely convenient. Scroll through your mentions and thank all those retweeters in just a few minutes.
- Publisher View: The call it the Publisher tab, but it’s really an awesome calendar view for looking at tweets you have scheduled to go out. This is especially awesome if you have teammates you need to check on. With the calendar feed you can see what is pending for each Twitter account from now until the end of time. You can break it down by the author and by account it is pending on. It’s great for making sure your Twitter feed will be consistent and aren’t lapsing into extended silences or blasting your feed too hard at one time.
- Analytics: Just like the picture up there says, “wise birds watch traffic signs.” With Hootsuite you have the option to look at built-in analytics related to your tweeting and updating. These, in conjunction with your website metrics should make for a very nimble and effective social media strategy.
Go mobile too! You can take all these great tools on the road with you with the Hootsuite app for Android and iPhone (and Blackberry). Set alerts and customize your mobile experience just like the desktop one. The great thing is they sync too so all that great work you do setting up streams on the regular Hootsuite translates right over to your mobile version.