HootSuite

Last June, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo told a tech-conference audience that the microblog's 140 million users tweet 400 million times a day, as CNET's Dan Farber reported.

Some days it seems nearly all 400 million of those tweets appear on my home feed.

To ensure your tweets don't get lost in the crowd, you need to post your tweets at the times your followers are most likely to read them. Twitter-analysis services offer businesses and individuals tips and tools for ensuring tweets receive maximum exposure. Twitter itself provides Advertiser Analytics in various price ranges.

Determining the best … Read more

Unless you've been living under a rock (or maybe just don't read tech news) you probably already know that next Tuesday, October 4, is when Apple makes its next major announcement. While the company is tight-lipped as usual, we know that it will probably announce at least one new iPhone and when it plans to launch iOS 5, the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

One of the big known features of the new iOS is Twitter integration. Apple generally does a great job of creating intuitive interfaces for just about everything and what we've learned of Twitter on the iPhone sounds great, as you'll be able to tweet directly from Safari, Photos, YouTube, and Camera. But if you're a serious Twitter user, you're still going to need a third-party app to get all that Twitter has to offer.… Read more

It's not easy to keep up with social networking sites, especially when you don't share the same information across them. You might use Twitter for business and post more personal information on Facebook, or you might want to share something on your WordPress blog that you don't necessarily want on LinkedIn. HootSuite is a handy extension for Google Chrome that lets you easily share updates, links, and images on multiple social networking sites, but only when and where you choose.

The extension appears in Chrome as an icon to the right of the address bar. Users can … Read more

Twitter is trying out a new feature to display ads, or promoted tweets, directly in a user's Twitter stream, but the company admits it's watching carefully to see how people react.

The site expanded its "promoted tweets" feature yesterday, starting slowly by displaying the ads only for those who use HootSuite, a third-party Twitter client. Promoted tweets are tweets that advertisers pay to show to a large number of people, similar to the way advertisers pay for sponsored links that appear among search results at Google.

Those who access Twitter through HootSuite will begin to see … Read more

Ever tried to share a Twitter account with someone else? Probably not, but there are a growing number of businesses that do it on a daily basis. And until Twitter's own "contributors" service is available to the general public, there's room for companies that have come up with solutions that don't require sharing your log-in or e-mail credentials with others.

BirdHerd, which is opening up to a large group of beta testers Wednesday, does just that. As an account owner, you simply give BirdHerd the OK through OAuth to send out messages to your account. … Read more

What's happening in meetings I've been in here is likely similar to what's happening in other corporations: People are gathering to figure out how to use, exploit, or simply not get their companies embarrassed on Twitter. But no matter what we agree to in these rooms (which, in my experience, isn't much), one thing is sure: You can't manage a major corporate Twitter presence on Twitter.com itself. Nor, for that matter, can you in one of the popular client apps like Tweetdeck or the current Seesmic Desktop. You need something built for customer service or brand management. New tools are emerging for just that.

The two I recommend are Invoke's HootSuite, which is in open beta right now (version 2.0 is in private beta), and CoTweet, which is still closed. I've tried them both.

The products have much in common. Both allow you to control and monitor multiple Twitter accounts, and give other people access to those accounts as you see fit. In both, you can maintain password control of your Twitter accounts -- users need only know their HootSuite or CoTweet login to see their assigned accounts and reply on your company's behalf. You can add or take people off accounts without having to get into the weeds in Twitter itself.

Both products let you post from any of your configured Twitter accounts, or all of them together if you like. And the both support the automatic addition of "cotags," like the short, signed bylines (example: "^RN" for Rafe Needleman) you're beginning to see in multi-person corporate Twitter accounts. You can also set up posts to go out at future times in both products, nice for running rudimentary marketing campaigns.

Both give you stats on links you share from the service. HootSuite uses its own shortener, ow.ly, and its stats are very deep. CoTweet uses the capable Bit.ly but displays only the most rudimentary stats from that service, unfortunately.

HootSuite is the geekier tool, and it's more powerful than CoTweet in some ways. The 2.0 version (due out by July) supports multiple columns, like Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. Its statistics, as I said, are deep. It can show you things like the most influential re-tweeters of your links.

HootSuite will also monitor RSS feeds and send headlines out in your Twitter feeds automatically. That's a pretty slick feature. I've used Twitterfeed to do that in the past (that's how the @Webware feed works), but like the idea of integrating the RSS harvester into a more comprehensive tool.

In the user management category, HootSuite lets you follow or unfollow people from within the client, as well as report spammers to Twitter HQ with one button click.

… Read more