The Best Social Media Organizer…Today | Hootsuite

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I am a digital strategist, which means I create, build, and manage digital marketing campaigns for businesses. In my line of work finding tech tools to organize and keep track of the madness is a necessity! Every time a new one comes along we check it out, because if it works better it’s worth the time to figure that out.

Today the one I am still using and “loving” is Hootsuite. I have gone back and forth between Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, CoTweet, and many, many others. So why is Hootsuite my favorite for today? Well let me tell you why….

Pros

1. Web Based – no downloads
2. Manage multiple social media accounts; Twitter, Facebook profile & page, MySpace, WordPress, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Ping.fm
3. Manage multiple accounts on each network
4. Multiple User Access
5. Schedule Tweets
6. RSS feeds, tweet from feeds
7. URL Shortner with tracking
8. Google Analytics integration
9. HTML 5 interface allows you to drag and drop files or images from your desk top to the post box.
10. Drag and drop extends to user profiles, drag a user profile image to the post box to reply or mention. (great for mass replies)
11. Klout interface, to track the influence or Twitter buddies
12. Mobile apps for iPhone and Android (paid version is the best)

Cons

1. Does not integrate with bit.ly, must use their shortner
2. Facebook interface is limited, can only comment on items – no sharing or liking. Also cannot see messages or friend requests.
3. LinkedIn interface is limited, can only see status updates. Would be nice to have LinkedIn group interface.
4. No Youtube or video site integration

As you can see the pros far outshine the cons. I would like to see Facebook and LinkedIn get to where Twitter is on usability and features. I would love to see them add a video network like Youtube in the mix, that would bring them way ahead of the competition. Finally, I would like to see them add in “network” statistics. By network I am referring to the users in your team, Hootsuite allows you to invite other users to manage accounts, you can see if another user replied to a tweet but to see how many you must manually scroll through. I would like to see some team stats that show what each team member has been doing on each network.

HootSuite enables you to update to multiple accounts at once, and supports Twitter, Facebook () profiles and pages, LinkedIn (), Ping ().fm, WordPress (), MySpace () and Foursquare (). Similar to TweetDeck, these features make the application useful for maintaining your overall social presence. Moreover, you can allow other users to jointly update an account, integrate Google Analytics () for your stats and schedule tweets and updates ahead of time.

Related Articles…..

• HootSuite Info-sheet – The Basics [del.icio.us] (slideshare.net)
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• Top 20 Sites to Improve Your Twitter Experience (mashable.com)