Today’s blog post was contributed by my guest, Ann Smarty, who I have gotten to know through her managing the LinkedIn Subgroup “The Guest Blogger.”   Her post is about my preferred Twitter tool which I am also passionate about and use in my own social media consulting and implementation, Hootsuite, which just today released new Social CRM features allowing you to filter tweets by Klout score or keyword.  Ann is also currently Director of Media for BlueGlass.

Business power Tweeters can rejoice – the tool you need is finally here. Any business who has a social media policy and uses Twitter or Facebook extensively to reach out to customers now can fully manage their social activities through this site.

Hootsuite is an evolution of Twitter management that started out as “Brightkit” in 2008. While Brightkit began with potential, the creators found that the name was not in line with their services.  Subsequently, the company updated their service features, changed the name to Hootsuite, and developed a winning product that is more than suitable for business and personal social media activities.

Hootsuite offers numerous features that result in maximum benefits to business mini-bloggers. Here is a look at a few of the best ones:

Manage Multiple Social Networks

Hootsuite allows a user to integrate multiple social networking sites into one manageable location. The first and main network is Twitter, giving you the ability to manage multiple Twitter accounts. And alongside Twitter, Hootsuite helps you manage accounts with Facebook, LinkedIn, and the ability to update a host of other social networks through Ping.fm.

Create and Manage Team Workflow

Hootsuite allows accounts to add as many users as they want. New users can be added from around the country and be given editorial permissions to update certain feeds and share tweeting responsibilities.

Create Twitter Lists

If you follow any number of Twitter accounts, managing and reading all the feeds can be nearly impossible. Hootsuite allows you to create lists of Twitter followers so you can more easily read their updates.

Customize URLs and Upload Files

Your tweets or other updates with links or files are a breeze with Hootsuite tools. It uses its own URL shortening function that allows you to customize URL parameters. If you want to share a file with your tweets or other updates like a photo, Hootsuite instantly converts the file into a shortened ow.ly link embedded into your update.

Schedule Tweets

Scheduling tweets is a feature that many businesses have demanded, but few have provided. Hootsuite allows a business to pre-write a number of tweet updates and schedule them for later posting onto Twitter. This allows you to provide new and fresh Twitter content any time of day.

New iPhone and Droid App

Hootsuite works with the iPhone and Droid mobile devices. Now your Hootsuite team can perform their social media duties anywhere.

Tracking Statistics

Hootsuite tracking provides you with comprehensive data about how many clicks your tweets are getting, where they are located geographically,

So what does all this mean for your business? The Hootsuite social management tool gives you many benefits:

·       Manage your brand – Through Hootsuite, you can find out what people are saying about your company. Track backlinks and retweets, and follow how your tweets are circulating.

·       Increased Productivity – Hootsuite gives your business added productivity with easy team workflow, tweet scheduling, stat tracking, all in one place.

·       Better Social Policy Communication – Your business can more easily manage how it executes its social media policy through unified interaction with all social media team members.

Indeed, HootSuite makes tweeting for businesses more productive, intuitive, and effective.

Listorious: The Preferred Method for Finding Relevant Twitter Lists and Users

One of the questions I get asked by relative newbies to Twitter is how to go about finding relevant people to follow.  The problem that a lot of Twitter newbies have is that they either 1) upload their entire email address book and follow everyone and/or 2) they start following some of Twitter’s Suggested Users.  This has the tendency to fill the Timeline that one sees with LOTS of Tweets that may be irrelevant, or finding yourself following a few hundred people that may not be active Tweeters.  Right off the bat your Follower/Following Ratio is horrible, the inactive Twitter “friends” you follow probably arent’ following you back, and you have a Timeline of Tweets that are just overwhelming.  Help!  How do we rectify this situation?  Start your Twitter experience by first following relevant people to whatever your Twitter Objective may be.  Let’s look at the options we have of finding relevant people to follow: (and it is worth noting that Twitter even realizes this situation and is considering dropping their Suggested User List all together)

1. Twitter User Directories

As you will find during your Twitter journey, there are several third-party services out there that allow you to compliment your time on www.twitter.com, starting with famous Twitter applications like TweetDeck or HootSuite (note: more to follow but LinkedIn just announced their new “Tweets” application which will bring Twitter functionality to your LinkedIn Homepage).  There are also a number of Twitter User Directories, where user profiles are scanned and added or you can manually add yourself.  The most famous of these sites is Twellow, and if you haven’t registered or look for relevant people there yet, you definitely should.

2. TweetDeck Directory

The popular 3rd Party Twitter Client Application TweetDeck released their own version of Twitter’s suggested users just two months ago, grouping tweeters into industries such as “News & Politics”, “Business”, “Technology”, or “Entertainment” with further sub-categories within each parent category.  At the time this was a significant improvement from the Twitter Suggested Users, but I found a lot of quality Twitter Users were not included on the list.  Which raises the question of how TweetDeck actually selected users for their directory.  Considering that this is Social Media, I was never comfortable with one “authority” telling us which Twitter Users to include (and thus who to exclude) when looking for subject matter experts in certain industries.

3. Twitter Lists

Enter the emergence of Twitter Lists, which just appeared on Twitter a few weeks ago but are already fundamentally changing the way in which we interact with the social networking site.  Twitter Lists are how we can arrange the Tweets that we see on our Timeline by grouping people together, much like creating a Group in TweetDeck, which was the preferred way of doing this until now.  But by classifying Twitter users, we are seeing the beginnings of a truly democratic way of finding relevant people to follow: Twitter Users themselves defining who are the people we should be following by creating Lists.  We can now view the Twitter Lists that we appear on and get an idea of like-minded people who we have been classified together with that we may want to follow.

4. Listorious

Listorious is Twitter User Lists on steroids.  Just as you can enter your own profile information and add tags on Twellow, you can do the same thing for your Twitter Lists on Listorious.  Rather than digging through all of the User Lists in which you are listed, just go to Listorious and enter a tag or keyword that you are interested in.  Voila!  You can now see the top User Lists for that tag in descending numbers by the number of Twitter users following those lists.  In other words, these are lists that have been both vetted by real Twitter Users and now are sorted in popularity by these same real Twitter Users.  There are TONS of tags that are registered, and Listorious has added information for the Top 140 User Lists as well as the Top 140 People Listed on User Lists.  You can spend a long time looking at the data here and find lots of truly relevant people to follow.

Listorious is the ultimate child of the User Generated Content world of Social Media and is a true symbol of the democratization of information that Twitter User Lists has enabled.  And to think that it launched just two weeks ago!  We have come a long way in a very little time thanks to Twitter Lists and the Twitter Lists API!

By the way, I cannot complete this blog post without thanking the person who introduced me to Listorious, a good friend and Windmill Networker Phil Lauterjung.  Phil is on my Blogroll, so you should check out his blog as well, but he introduced it to me in the comments of my previous blog post on 4 Great Ways to Use the New Twitter Lists.  Thank you Phil!  And it just goes to show how much 1) commenting adds to the value of blog posts, and 2) what you could miss out if you don’t read all of the comments attached to a blog post!

What are your experiences in finding new Twitter Users to follow?  Have you been using Listorious?  Please share your experiences!

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter may eliminate ‘suggested users’ list (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• 5 Reasons to Use the New Twitter List Feature (ducttapemarketing.com)
• Twitter Lists Organizes People You Follow (smarterware.org)
• Twitter Lists – Network redundancy for the Twitter conversation cloud (digital-constructions.com)