Its true we’re on information overload. We use multiple social networking platforms, which have different audiences and expectations. If you’re considering your audience, you’re wondering how you can add value. And if your considerting your schedule, your wondering how you can possibly catch everything?

Enter: Twitter curation.

There are several services that curate or organize tweets based on Twitter lists or keywords. Why bother with these services? Its ultimately a chicken-or-an-egg situation, because the service you choose will depend on what your trying to accomplish. Generally speaking though, they lend themselves to community building and time saving features. In some cases they may even help with audience building. For those who track this sort of thing, I’ve noticed that in some cases using a curation service can increase the Klout Score.  Unlike a Twitter stream, these curation tools offer a way to collect a lot of information in a single place.  Having content in a single space that isn’t changing every 10 seconds has its benefits. For businesses, it gives them another opportunity to showcase the most important or relevant information for their audiences.

I use Paper.li to share content from other Social Media Club members. Paper.li sends a daily tweet automatically and mentions the contributors by handle. Its a great way to support other Social Media Club professionals and its been a fantastic conversation starter. I don’t have to produce the product, its done automatically.  The “pro”  is that its a great community builder, the con is that I don’t have control over the content. I do however have control over the who is on the list, so the key to Paper.li is to curate your Twitter list carefully. Y0u can also add keywords from Facebook or specific hashtags to your Paper.li. They’ve done a great job of expanding ways to have control over the content as well as the look and feel of the product. The background on the webpage can be customized, but I have heard some feedback from others that the look is cluttered. I don’t personally feel that way, but I can understand the criticism. One thing I do like about the format is that “paper” has images, video and its in color. I find it to be fairly engaging.  Paper.li is free and I often recommend it for businesses looking to add value to their community and to support their community. Because it sends a Tweet out with @mentions, it gets the attention of those mentioned and if they aren’t currently following you back, its a nice way to say “hey, I follow you.”I do wish that I could add my Paper.li to my own website, but that isn’t a feature offered at this time.

Storify is another Twitter curation tool and a story-teller’s dream.  I find Storify works best with specific hashtags and is a fantastic way to curate conversation surrounding an event. You can essentially choose the Tweets you’d like to include and even arrange them in a timeline or order that you see fit. Storify includes photos that people have used right within the stream so there isn’t any need to click on a link. Like Paper.li, you can notify the people who have been included in the stream/story. Creating a cool Storify can be time consuming, but for event managers its well worth the effort of putting together the story of the event and promoting those who promoted your event. Particularly for multi-day events I could see Storify adding to the sense of community. You can add Storify to your website, which I appreciate. Its a nice way to keep track of the conversation surrounding your event and gives people a place and a chance to revisit it. Storify would also work really well for TweetChats, so long as your TweetChat doesn’t have 5,000 participants. Doing a Storify with thousands of people and sifting through all the ReTweets would be mind-numbing.  I did a Storify a couple of months ago for my friend Derek Gabriel as he and a friend spent 12 hours on Kauai. As their pictures were posted and others commented, the Storify got to be fun and interesting.

Twylah is another curation tool that has a great lay out, that’s easy to read. It pulls content from your Twitter page so it doesn’t do much for community building. However, if your looking to see your recent tweets on particular subjects, it categorizes them in a nice, easy to read format. Twylah would ROCK if you could embed it in a web page, but it doesn’t seem like that’s possible at this point. So without community building (ala other people’s content) there really isn’t any driver for anyone to visit my Twylah unless they are specifically looking to see what I’ve been saying on any particular topic. However, for heavy duty content producers (newspapers, magazines)  it might be a great thing to send to followers 1X/week or so just as a recap of the week’s Tweets and content.

I recently came across KeepStream too. Here you can keep lists of Twitter in track. I really wanted to publish a KeepStream for a particular hashtag, but it won’t let me do that. I wanted to really use it to track some Tweetchats, but while I can search Twitter for a particular hashtag, I can’t publish it with only that information, so I was disappointed. I can do a Twitter search on a hashtag just about anywhere, what I wanted was to archive it. It doesn’t appear to be a feature KeepStream offers. I do feel like I’m “missing” something on KeepStream, so if any of you have used it and found it helpful in a  particularly application, by all means, please let me know.

You might recall I also wrote an article on Trunk.ly a couple of months ago. I still use Trunk.ly, but not to its fullest potential. There is opportunity for community building there, but I sincerely haven’t had a chance to build out an audience there, or even follow others. I do find it extremely useful when I am searching for Tweets with links that I’ve sent or I’m searching a particular topic, its more of an archiving tool than a curation tool, but I thought I’d circle back around to that in case anyone was looking for something like it.

I’m really interested in hearing from others regarding other Twitter curation tools that they might be aware of or use!

It happened again this weekend. Over mimosas and a lovely chat. Laser focused and sincere the question came: “How many followers should I have on Twitter?” Ahh, yes. It’s still a common question, mostly I believe, because its the easiest to measure, its a number you can view at a glance.  I get this question a lot. My answer is always the same: “It depends on your goals. Generally speaking, I’d say the more important question is, how many people are sharing and discussing your info? How many people are talking about, distributing and sharing your information?” Of course you need some followers on Twitter, otherwise its as if your standing in the middle of the forest with a blow horn..what possible effect could that have (except to scare a few racoons)? But is number of users the best metric to track?

A prime example is this article on Aston Kutcher who is wildly admired for his Twitter fan base. Except, he has very little influence over that fan base. His tweets don’t drive action or response, mostly because he isn’t viewed as an “expert” on his topics. His fans might like to hear what’s on his mind, but they don’t necessarily take action on it. Now, you might desire a list like his and it certainly has brand potential, but you could generate more influence with a much smaller number of followers. Keep in mind, that a little over 95% of Twitter users have less than 500 followers and only .05% have more than 10,000 followers. Extraordinary, when you think about it, particularly given all the attention that Twitter garners. Chances are your business falls somewhere in the middle of that range.  I generally encourage my clients to measure engagement: defined as taking action such as conversation and information sharing.   However, this only highlights the need to find and engage both influencers and brand advocates. Your brand advocates will be different from your competitors. You need to find them and inspire them to act.

So the question then remains, what SHOULD you track on Twitter? Again, I’ll say that what you should measure depends on your strategy, what are you trying to accomplish with social media? Increased brand value? Increased share of voice? More customer passion?  The real nitty gritty is engaging with your followers and creating a relationship. That’s the artform of Twitter. Now, as I said in an earlier blog post, you should use several different metrics to dig deeper into your audience and see what’s really happening with the content your sharing. But here are a couple of metrics to monitor your Twitter efforts how you apply these metrics will be determined by your strategic goals.

Here are 5 metrics to measure on Twitter. They aren’t the only metrics and

Effective Reach multiplies a user and each of their retweeting user’s follower count by their calculated influence (the likelihood that that user will be retweeted or mentioned) to determine a likely and realistic representation of any user’s reach in Twitter at any given time. (According to Twitalyzer) You can also use a tool like TweetReach to monitor a particular #hashtag, URL, phrase or user name. The paid version is well worth it for particular campaigns.

Potential Reach sums a user’s follower count and the sum of followers for any user retweeting any of their Tweets during the previous seven days to estimate the total potential reach in Twitter at any given time. (According to Twitalyzer)

Number of Clicks on Links You can track the number of clicks you receive on particular links you share on a number of different platforms. Analyze the links every 30-60-90 days and watch for consistencies for what is shared and commented on. That will tell you what kind of information your audience craves from you.

Website Traffic: Including top referral sources, time on page and number of pages per referral source.

Comments and Shares on Website/Blog: Track the topic and the number of shares and discussion around the topic. PostRank will help balance out the information from Google Analytics, including RSS feed tracking and conversation on Twitter surrounding a particular link.
If you’d like more information on the key metrics for your businesses social media efforts, the 1st 3 companies who sign up for our Analytics and Metrics Package between now and August 1 will receive a FREE information-packed report on Social Media ROI worth $447.

I’m kind’a freaked out. I’m not gonna lie. There’s something stinky go’n on up in here.

If you read this blog with any sort of regularity, you know that I like to measure my efforts, especially those of my clients. Something I strongly recommend measuring is “Engagement.” Typically, I define engagement as sharing, clicking or commenting. When something’s interesting, people say so. When its not, well – they ignore it. Its that simple (or that complicated). I think used to think engagement was a great measurement tool.

When I engage (click, share or comment) its because I think the information has been worth my time and I want my audience to see it. I consider it an endorsement – for whatever that’s worth.

But lately I’ve picked up on a trend that makes me question my engagement with the word “engagement”. Maybe I toss around that word too casually, as I do the words “love” and “safe to drink.” I’ve noticed lots of sharing going on that doesn’t correspond to web traffic. Now, I’m not a live and die by web traffic girl, but when I see great big gaps, I have to dig deeper. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the sharing. I always try to thank everyone who gives the shout-out love (there’s that casual use of the “L” word again.) And sometimes, particularly of late, the conversation (engagement) happens on Twitter or Facebook, so its not going to correspond exactly to web traffic.  But its disturbing the increase I see of  people are sharing things when they don’t know what it says. What if the headline is “8 ways to make 1 million dollars using Twitter” bet that would get shared. But what if the content were blank, or worse, filled with crackpot advice, or more likely a porno video with a nasty virus? What happens when your audience clicks on it and finds worthless or dangerous information. Its short of like handing someone a carton of milk from your refrigerator without giving it the sniff test first..right?  Isn’t that a reflection on the sharer too? Or do I have it backwards, if your taking milk from someone who has to sniff it..what does that say about you?

Either way: stinky milk should never be shared or consumed.

Engagement definitions really need to go deeper, to ongoing relationships that can be better tracked with something like #Hashable, where conversations, not just RT’s, can be tracked over time. We already stopped kidding ourselves that a “follower” doesn’t necessarily = friend and that a RT doesn’t imply some sort of life-long commitment (for either party, for you legal nitpickers). But now we should start thinking about the people who are sharing the information and how engaged they are to that information. Because an engagement ring holds no promise until its worn. Content shared but not consumed is similarly empty. We gotta put that ring on a finger and care enough to sniff the milk before you give it out. Don’t just rely on numbers because they are easy….dig deeper..smell the milk before you smell the roses. Find out whose really engaging with your information, cultivate that relationship and turn it into a real engagement. After all, isn’t that the promise of social media?

Yes, that makes life slightly more complicated, but in the meantime, I think I’m going to have to rethink my engagement to engagement..and stinky milk.

What do you guys think? Am I off base? Should I quite my whining? What does satisfactory engagement look like to you?

Photo: Creative Commons Wallyg

In life, there are some mysteries. Like why do some of the great inventions remain best kept secrets?

Today, I am  going to reveal a tool that you probably wished for, but didn’t think an egghead had developed yet.

Auto DM’s have always been a source of controversy. Were they a nice way to welcome new followers or a spammy annoyance? As Twitter users increased, they become an increasing annoyance, there are more self promotional cretins in my DM folder than in all of the WWF. Just as I began to realize that I’d sincerely had it with auto DM’s, I quit sending my own (yes, I had been in the “nice way to welcome followers” camp). But it wasn’t enough for me to stop my own DM’s. I was starting to miss actual REAL DM’s from people I knew because I was ignoring the garbage pail that my DM folder had become. I needed to find a way to increase my efficiency of Twitter too.

Enter Auto DM Opt Out by SocialOomph. Genius. Normally I do a “like” and “meh” section on tools, but honestly, there is nothing NOT to like about this Opt Out tool, unless you are sending a spammy-self-promotional-auto-DM-selling me on your latest e-book, MLM scheme or a real estate get rich quick scheme.  So here’s how it works:

Yep. That’s it. Its that easy. I’m personally surprised that only 11,341 people have used this tool. But again, I say, sometimes you wonder why the most brilliant inventions don’t get traction. Meanwhile the most useless tools are getting all the sunshine.

I’ve been using the service for about 3 weeks now and I can report with glee that my DM inbox has been restored to full efficiency. While their disclaimer says they can’t eliminate all other bots its a testament to SocialOomph’s market penetration that it seems to have eliminated all most of mine!  And if you DM me now, your even likely to get a real, unautomated response.

Do you guys know of any other Twitter tools that improve Twitter efficiency or eliminate Auto DM?  Please share!

I recently read an article by Tom Webster about the fact that measuring social media is limited largely by the fact that most data comes from Twitter rather than Facebook which has far more users, which limits the over all data a business receives from social media programs like Radian6. The fact that Facebook is a closed ecosystem has been a frustration of mine for some time, its one of the reasons that Twitter is one of my darlings, there is so much I can see and measure there. Alas, as Tom’s presentation on The Social Habit 2011 points out, according to Arbitron only 8% of Americans are using Twitter, despite incredibly high awareness numbers. Facebook continues to dominate the social scene, particularly in brand interaction.

But here’s the deal:  8% of Americans is still 20 million users. Please tell me any other marketing or promotions avenue which gives you access to 20 million users for free. Seriously. When I worked in magazines and tradeshows if I had been delivering 20 million readers or attendees, almost everyone one of my client’s problems would have been solved, and I would have been a hero. Alas, here’s the rub: there is a lot of junk in that group of 20 million people. Some of them will apply to you, some of them won’t. Some of them are active users (3 in 10 user Twitter daily), some of them aren’t.  But those who are using Twitter are apparently using the service more and more and Twitter users are more likely to use multiple platforms. Combine this with the fact that because Tweets are so easily indexed by search engines and its easy to see how the power of Twitter and its influencers can extend beyond the power of this single platform. Despite the short comings of services like Klout and Peer Index, there is significant relevance in identifying influencers who can evangelize your product. In fact, in light of the recent data, its all the more important to identify these people. Because those people on Twitter will almost assuredly be on Facebook (since 98% of Social Networkers are Facebook users).  Think of Twitter as the gateway drug to Facebook. While most Facebook users do not have a Twitter account, most Twitter users will have a Facebook account. And since businesses can not reach out to people who aren’t already fans, finding key influencers on Twitter will likely lead you to key influencers on Facebook. When you merge the idea that Twitter’s users are heavy social media users and typically cross platform users, with the Forrester Social Technographics information that suggests that MOST people are not social media creators or even critics, but spectators the importance of influencers becomes even more obvious. Because, generally speaking, most users (except influencers) use social media to listen, rather than actively engage.

For businesses considering a social media strategy, the question for Twitter clearly has to be: can we identify some key influencers and engage them?

What say you? Do you agree with me that Twitter is the gateway drug to Facebook?

Resources:

The Social Habit 2011 (download from SlideShare here)

Twitter X Factors (download from SlideShare here)

Tom Webster and BrandSavant.com

Forrester Research Social Technographics

Every once in awhile, you come across a tool that is like a good man: sturdy and dependable. You know, the kind of tool which is so fantastically reliable and trustworthy that it doesn’t matter if it isn’t the Rob Lowe of interfaces. You know, more

Tracking Twitter and Facebook efforts can be overwhelming. There are influencers to identify, key words, promotions to manage and the more data you find, the more data you want. That’s one really big reason why I want to be able to export all my reports into spreadsheet format. The ability to compare and contrast different pieces of data and see correlations is very important to understanding the overall effect of Twitter, or a campaign. I’m still not at the point where one product gives me everything I need, because frankly, different clients have different strategies and measure different things, BUT, one product that I have been using and truly appreciating is RowFeeder.

So let’s jump right in, here’s what I think rocks about RowFeeder.

What I like:

Tracks the two biggies: Since Facebook is essentially a closed system, its harder for analytics tools to exist to support Facebook. But RowFeeder is able to integrate Facebook posts into its reporting. This allows you to compare Twitter and Facebook side by side. I KNOW you can technically do that now, but its a lot of steps to blends the data and why should I do that when RowFeeder does it for me? RowFeeder doesn’t replace Facebook Insights (as un-insightful as they may be), but it does provide some additional perspective for your business. For example: where are the conversations about your brand, product or even competitors really taking place?

Search terms on steroids: Rowfeeder is a keyword search measurement tool. But before you say “I can search keywords in 1 billion places” here’s what makes Rowfeeder great, not only can you track a term of you can do so over a long period of time. The idea that you can track a keyword for 24 hours and understand its impact is pretty short-sighted. You’ll identify your keywords using other tools, but you’ll understand their meaning and implications with Rowfeeder.

Reporting Rockstar: There are over 9 reports that can be generated including a Pre-built over all snapshot report that has pivots tables and compares Posts By Network (Twitter vs. Facebook), Top Keywords and Potential Twitter Impressions. This report also breaks down percentages of RT, @mentions, and whether a post had a link. Another element of this report that I like is the “Most Followed” users, those who have mentioned your keyword that have the most followers. And then, to dial down into each of those segments, there is a more detailed report to run. I also really like the “Conversation Report” which breaks down other keywords that were used with your keyword so you can see the context. For example, I was searching a business name, but there were other tweets that used the same word, this helped me see the overall conversations and understand their relevancy. I can also just go to the data source (another reason why I like that they download to spreadsheet format) and remove those tweets, then my data is cleaner.

Another report that I like picks random winners from Twitter contests. Simply brilliant.

What’s Meh:

Excel-Shmel: After 4 years of Macintosh usage, I’ve finally converted completely to MacOS. It was a long hard slog for me as I was pretty adept at all the Windows ins and outs. Now, with RowFeeder, I’ve got to go back and get Excel IF I want to use their pre-formatted graphs. I’m dealing with my disappointment and managing, but I still wish that the reports could also be Numbers based. In fairness to RowFeeder, this is actually a Numbers shortfall (it doesn’t do pivot tables) and not a RowFeeder oversight, but still, its a “Meh”.

Overall, I really like RowFeeder, I think its a great tool.Their subscription options are very affordable:

In addition, they have a Freemium model that lets you use one search term. Its enough to test out the program, but not enough to take full advantage of all the info you’ll receive from RowFeeder.

If you are interesting in trying out RowFeeder, consider using this link, it upgrades my membership a bit and doesn’t cost you anything extra. Thanks!

Let me know if you try out RowFeeder or you are using it now, I’d love to hear your experiences.

I have about  A LOT of web-based apps I am using to help make social media tracking easier. Which is why is started “Tool Tuesday”, because I think you, ,my awesome readers might like to know what the experience is like before they plop down their own cash or spend their own time. But the thing is, I’m using so many that I’m getting to the point that I wonder if its getting harder to get easier. But I digress. One tool that I do find myself using regularly is SproutSocial I’ve been using it since about February. I wouldn’t say that I am CRAZY about the tool – but I do go to it regularly enough to share it with you.  You can take it for a test spin for free, but I did upgrade my membership to the professional edition for $92/year.

So without further delay, here’s the SproutSocial scoop as I see it.

What I like:

Interface: Slick interface, easy to see information at a glance. The widgets on the dashboard can be moved around so you’re dashboard reflects the information of the highest priority to you.

Inbox: This is a useful tool as I can moderate Twitter, Facebook (pages and profile)  mentions of my handles as well as business name. I was also grateful to it when I switched my Twitter handle to @taracoomans I could monitor mentions to that old handle easily. I can also view LinkedIn alerts from the “inbox” as well.  The inbox also captures Twitter RT (which Hootesuite does not) so when someone send a RT without the RT tag, I can still catch it.You can also “Flag” messages for response. This is particularly helpful is you are working with a team of people to monitor and respond to tweets.

Contacts: I love that when I click on a contact, I can see the conversations I’ve had with the person. This is probably my favorite feature. Whether you are tracking a twitter account for a business or brand or yourself, seeing a history of conversations is pretty great. Another feature that is “nice” is that  I can also add details like email and phone and note to a contact, but I have to do that by hand..and really..when am I going to do that..and why?   This has serious potential, but as of right now, its pretty static. How about downloading these conversations?   I would get really excited if it were were integrated with Hashable, which attempts to show the depth of  your social relationships. I also notice that the “Contacts in Common” isn’t totally accurate. Not sure how much I care about that, but when I see that, I wonder what “other” glitches there are that are effecting the information I am seeing and using..and in this case, paying for.

Schedule: Like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, you can schedule tweets from Sprout Social. But what’s unique is that Sprout Social shows you the best times to schedule a tweet to get the most visibility. My guess is that it does this based on past tweet times that generate the most engagement. Although I don’t actually schedule tweets from Sprout Social, I do like this feature. I also think its cool that you can schedule a recurring tweet as well. Again, I don’t use this, but I can see the usefulness of this, particularly for events or tweetchats or similar.”Schedule” also lets you post your RSS feeds if you’re into that sort of thing.

What’s “Meh”

Engagement/Influence Scores: Do I really need ANOTHER one? On the other hand, if your just using “Influence” scores to measure your own effectiveness, then I guess this is helpful. But, they don’t really tell me what they measure, so its difficult to compare how this influence/engagement score compares to others and why theirs is more valuable to me than others. All in all, its a wash in my book.

Reports: Pretty basic stuff. I can get this information and more from my Twitalyzer account. Not only that, but when I export the reports, it comes to me in PDF version. I’d really rather have it in a spreadsheet format. It makes it easier to compare information over time. Another thing that kind’a chaps my hide is that it tells me how many clicks I’ve had, but not what tweets were most popular. What good is knowing the quantity without putting into perspective? I’m not running a popularity contest – I’m looking for good, hardcore data that tells me what my particular audience digs. Also, for those of you who run reports for clients, Sport Social’s aren’t white labeled. That may or may not be important to you..but if it is, its kind’a a deal killer.

What do you guys think? Are you using Sport Social? Agree or disagree with my assessment?

Today we’re keeping it simple with some tactical suggestions on using Twitter for business. It isn’t that this list is complete or even that it ever will be. I’ve just noticed that lots of businesses (large and small) aren’t implementing these easy tactics into the  Twitter social media presence. Without further adieu…

6 Easy Twitter DO’s for Business:

• Try as hard as you can to thank people who support you and RT your messages, especially when you are a business. Alot of businesses think that its not appropriate to “thank” people. That it appears too “folksy”. “Folksy. Riiiiight. Remember that guy or gal in high school who you though was cool/pretty/smart and when you told them so, they just brushed right past you without response? How did it make you feel? Like you’d never hand anyone a compliment again? Yah. Go ahead – make your advocates feel that way. At your own peril.   And, if you are too busy to respond to all your positive social media comments, then I’d say you need to expand your social media budget and add staff. Your customers are clearly on social media and want to engage with you there – you have a problem many companies would love to have.
• When you are discussing a link or a topic, go ahead and add the link again to the conversation – or at the very least, a #hashtag so people can keep up with the conversation. Besides being thoughtful, its also savvy.
• Resist the urge to hijack a trending topic or #hashtag. If you have something to say that’s relevant to the #hashtag or trending topic, by all means – say it and ride the wave. Be creative. Be savvy. Be human. Just don’t be spammy.
• Add to the conversation, don’t be the conversation-interrupting-blood-draining-dufus who interrupts the conversation with a commercial! Add to the conversation and you’re likely to get (the right) kind of attention. Soundbites are a major turn-off on social media – save it for your radio campaign.
• Assume that the person complaining is complaining so that they get resolution. If they didn’t care – they would just tell their friends, and their parents..and their auntie…they wouldn’t bother giving you a chance to respond. For more on turning complainers into BFF’s, read here.
• Be consistent. No fair jumping in and out of the conversation. Your advocates like it much better when they know you’re listening. If you are going to have a presence, make time for it everyday. Yes. Everyday. Recent studies show that Facebook postings made outside of business hours are more effective. Its easier than ever to have a presence without being tied to your computer 24/7 – take advantage of the little spaces in your day and schedule your outgoing information accordingly.

What recommendations do you have for businesses using Twitter?

If you or your company is spending a lot of time crafting stories, being human and creating relationships you may occasionally find yourself with a Twitter tunnel vision. That is to say, you feel like things are going great, you’re having engaging conversations regularly and feel as though you even have some “friends” in Twitter.

Its easy to get lulled into a false sense of success. At this point, a wake-up call is imperative. We should never sit on our laurels in social media. Enter Qwitter.

This simple to use and free (for basic) service alerts you everyday to your latest Twitter Unfollows. Why is this important? Whether you are a personal brand or a corporate brand or a small company, this daily review is a decent pulse-taking exercise on the reactions to your recent activity. Using a form like this, if you are tracking your follows AND unfollows, you’ll begin to get a feel for how your content is reverberating across the Twitter-sphere.With trend tracking you can more easily identify which type of content is engaging or turning off and as importantly, you’ll see who is following and unfollowing and see if there is reason for concern.

What I like:

Unobtrusive: Its a single email once a day.   Yes, the free version includes advertising, but I don’t mind the advertising – after all, someone has to pay for the services I’m receiving. The paid version provides for ad-free emails.

Easy to use: The list is of Twitter followers with links to their profiles. A quick set of clicks will tell me if these “unfollows” should denote a response. Responses may vary, but business users may choose to reach out to particularly active or influential followers who have suddenly stopped following. There might be a message or story there.

Low Barrier of Entry: Unlike so many free services where the balance of information the user receives vs. information the user gives , Qwitter strikes a simple balance, it provides simple, basic information and only asks for two things: Twitter screen name and email address. To date, I have not received any spam that I can trace back to Qwitter, indeed, my emails from them are simply those that I have requested.

Not everything to everybody: Qwitter is a simple service that does what it says it does and does it well. It isn’t overwhelming or a massive time-suck like other Twitter services. In fact, its hard to believe this, but the emails aren’t even crafted to take you back to the Qwitter page.

What I wish could be improved:

Export List: I wish the lists of “unfollows” could be exported to a spreadsheet that showed the day and time of the unfollow. I typically recommend that my clients track this list on a daily basis and compare it to their content conversations. This is time consuming, but there can be some rich information there and watching trends can be invaluable. That would be worth paying for!

Like all Twitter users, I originally used Twitter.com for managing my account. Quickly realizing that there had to be a better way I started playing with Twitter aggregation and organizers. Originally, I was passionate about Tweetdeck, which I still think is a pretty great tool, it just ins’t the one I use now.

Hootsuite History

Really, when you think about it, its amazing I changed at all. At first I was reluctant to have a web-based platform (as opposed to a software platform), this is largly a matter of personal preference and has more to do with how I organize my time than anything else. But the person who introduced me to Hootsuite continued to prod and encourage me.

At this point (Summer 2009), Hootsuite was really pretty rudimentary, you could have multiple streams for search terms and you could create lists (which Twitter later allowed you to do) and manage multiple accounts from one location.  I liked the way it was organized and grew to appreciate the web-based model.

Hootsuite was still in full-swinging freemium mode at this point; it was like the ’60′s: free love, lots of features being added, without consequences. Features  like integration with GoogleAnalytics, ability to post to other social networks such as Facebook Pages and LinkedIn quickly became a requirement. It seemed that Hootsuite was really moving after the social media professional. They kept adding features like the ability to have team members on your multiple accounts.I also like that their Iphone App (also available on Droid+BB) also lets me manage my multiple accounts on the go.

Understandably, last fall, Hootsuite went to a paid model. At this point, it became like an engagement. I thought I’d stay with the pay model, after all, I could still change my mind at any time.

I haven’t regretted it all. If Hootsuite continues to invest in its offerings, I see no reason to use anyone else.

Here’s what the paid model offers that makes me love it and keep paying for it:

Facebook Page + Google Analytics Integration:

GA-Tweet Integration Page

The good: Seeing the overlay of tweets with these two analytic pieces is priceless. Yes, GA is free. Yes, Facebook Insights are free. But it’s the overlay that I find valuable. I like being able to see my results fairly quickly. I use other tools to gauge the best time to send tweets to my audience, but that’s a moving target. This gives me the best insight into how my tweets and Facebook page postings effect my website’s traffic.  Data and graphs can be printed…but…

The bad: I still wish they had of exporting this data. Without the ability to export the combined information, it remains largely qualitative and hard to track trends. Sure, its rewarding and exciting to see, but it really doesn’t allow me to play with the data the way I would like. Also, to track your clicks in Hootsuite, you must use the “owly” shortener.  This isn’t a huge deal within Hootesuite, but if you want to track clicks with say your shares from your blog page there is no way to do that right now. Perhaps that will be a feature in the future?

Teams:

Raising a social media account usually takes a village. Well, OK, maybe “village” is a bit strong, but having more than one person on an account is practical and advisable, especially when you are integrating multiple departments and stakeholders.

The good: Like Co-Tweet, you can create assignments for team members, this might include assigning a particular person to respond to a tweet, or just creating an assignment to tweet about a topic. Very helpful in staying organized. As a manager of several accounts, having the ability to communicate with my clients in this way is important. I find this feature to be very intuitive as well; easier than Co-Tweet in my opinion.  Along these lines, there is also the ability to email a tweet to someone; this is handy for private link sharing or calling attention to a tweet that you may or may not need to respond to.  Its a much better option than DM (Direct Message) which has basically become a spam-for-all.

The bad: While Hootsuite itself is very affordable, the cost of adding users is really comparatively expensive ($15/user/month) and this scales up. In otherwords, if you are an agency with multiple team members, you’re 6-10 team members cost you $30/month/user. This is hardly a huge expense for a business, but is the most costly element of using Hootsuite.

Influencial Identification

The good: Hootsuite not only makes Klout score easy to see in a user’s profile, but it also lists your most recent influencial community members and helps you target who is engaging with you and how frequently. This information can also be exported, which is great when you are trying to build engagement.

The bad: The list of influencers mentioning you is ongoing and can’t be drilled down by date. This makes it a little harder to see the effects of a particular campaign. Although if you are tracking this data regularly and you have a baseline, then you will be able to glean the information with just a little spreadsheet love.

Hootsuite Streams+Tabs

Streams:

The good: Hootsuite allows up to 10 streams a tab, while I find this limitation irritating, the truth is that the human brain probably can’t process even that many streams and I know most screens can’t. There are many things you can do with the streams including keyword tracking and sentiment. You can create streams for Twitter lists too. The stream options are endless, making the 10 stream/tab limitation maddening.

The bad: Twitter lists through Hootsuite are not the easiest to manage. If you don’t have a stream for your list, you can’t add them to the list from Hootsuite. Also, did I mention that 10 stream/tab limitation? Did I? Huh?

Overall, Hootsuite remains my tool of choice. I find it intuitive, manageable and practical.  If you think you’d like to try out the Pro Version of Hootsuite, please consider using my affiliate link: http://hootsuite.com/p_1045 it doesn’t cost you more and I appreciate your support. I chose to become an affiliate because its a tool that I genuinely stand behind. I think you’ll appreciate it as well. If you don’t, its a month-month, you can cancel.

I’d love to hear from Hootsuite users and nonusers about what dashboard tool you use and why?