Category: Social Media

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HootSuite Moves To A Paid Model

If you are serious about social networking and social media then you are probably using HootSuite already. If you are not, HootSuite is our application of choice for our various writers and to house our myriad of client accounts.

HootSuite has been free for the last two years and we have enjoyed and really used the service. In fact is wasn’t until Facebook chopped Fan Page posting by third parties that we really found out just how much we depend on the application to manage our growing social media enterprise.

In the next seven days if you use HootSuite, you will be forced to choose either the free restricted use option or will have to move to the Pro paid option that is based on a pricey fee structure for team members. You get yourself free and four more team members for $15 each. Add another member and it is $30 per member up to a cap. Ouch that can get expensive for certain businesses ours included.

Social media is here to stay and our service offerings and number of clients is steadily growing with HootSuite, even the paid Pro version we can quickly and effectively do the work we need to do. I consider HootSuite and integral part of our service offerings.

Please note HootSuite will pay me a small commission if you sign up for a Pro account, but that is not my reason for writing this post.

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Top Social Media Tools for Teams

If you are doing team work on social media accounts what are the most effective tools to use? For me, I like HootSuite, but I have looked at others. This post features three services you may want to consider for your own team’s use.

HootSuite
This is by far my favorite and then one that my team of six people uses to manage clients’ social media accounts. HootSuite used to be totally free, but now has a paid option. For personal users, you can still use HootSuite free, but for business team users such as myself you will pay based on the number of team members. We will soon be paying just a little under $100 a month for access to this online service. But we have many accounts and six team members working on the same account. You can check out HootSuite now.

CoTweet
This is a nice online application that is free as well to consider if you have just one or two team members and need to load multiple Twitter accounts. It does not offer Facebook Business Page features, but great for Twitter. The interface is easy to use and does allow you to review pending updates and sent updates as well as your streams. You can check out CoTweet now. Although I do not like the interface as much as I do the one at HootSuite for small teams using Twitter only this would be adequate and totally free.

I have looked at other applications but this post is about team social media work so TweetDeck although popular is not a good fit as it does not allow team collaboration. If you have one you really like, leave the name and link in the comments.

Please note that HootSuite will pay me a small commission, but only if you sign up for a Pro account.

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More on the New Digg Site and Why You Need to Try It Too

I spoke briefly about the new Digg in last month’s newsletter and this month I want to pass on my candid comments after having really used the application.

First, I really like it. It was easy to update my profile and the application allowed me to feed my blog, post my website URL, link in Facebook and tie in Twitter. In other words, it allowed me to create a complete profile that showcases my outreach programs to allow followers to get a broader picture of my online interaction.

But what I am finding is that Digg is not just about letting people know about you, it is about finding out what other people are talking about in your industry too.

I use many tools to stay on top of what is going on in my industry – RSS feeds, watching forums, monitoring important blogs, and watching certain users on Twitter. What I have found from my use of Digg is that I can more quickly get the “pulse” of what is happening by watching the Digg counts on topics and articles. I can search by topic, industry, and even keyword and then see what articles have been “Dugg” by others; rising to importance. I can then choose to click-in to read the full article and even “Digg” it myself to post it to my own personal profile.

This ability to see what is happening quickly on a topic is incredibly valuable. I find one of the hardest things as a busy professional is to identify who to watch with the time I have. Although I watch some very specific people and authority sites, I am aware that I could be missing legitimate new voices that are emerging in my industry or with new thoughts or applications by not watching a greater variety of sites and people. Digg allows me to do just that; watch people and topics that I maybe was not aware of and should be watching on a regular basis.

Digg now allows you to follow these key new people, almost in a Twitter-like way, so that once you find them in a Digg or topic search, you can monitor their traffic, social bookmarks, blog posts, and tweets. In some ways I think that this instant ability to track trending information may be more important to me in the long run than monitoring blog posts of people in my own industry.

In this world of rapid fire information exchange, it is important to know what to watch, what is trending, and what other industry experts are talking about. If you are active in your industry, this is another really great tool to maintain your edge over your competition.

You don’t have to be an Internet Marketing professional to use Digg. Digg can be valuable for any industry professional. To set up your own account and try out Digg visit http://www.digg.com. Don’t forget to follow us when you do your set up, our Digg page is http://www.digg.com/mccordweb.

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My Business Doesn’t Need to Have a Facebook Fan Page, Does It?

Oh, how wrong can you be. I talked recently to a marketing executive of a national firm and when the topic of Facebook Fan pages came up, his response was “only my wife uses Facebook my business doesn’t need one.”

Just this past week many news resources and even PC World Magazine reported that a users time on Facebook eclipsed the time spent on Google for the first time ever. Read the full article online. That makes Facebook simply too hard to ignore even if you personally think otherwise. The article states that a user spent 9.6% of their Web time on Google and 9.9% on Facebook in the month of August 2010. Additionally this is nearly double the amount of time spent on Facebook in August 2009. Facebook activity is a phenomena that cannot be ignored!

It is important to meet and greet customers and prospects where they are active., and they are active on Facebook and looking to connect there. For a business to not have a Facebook Fan Page, especially for nationally positioned and national selling firms, it is in my humble opinion a mistake. In many cases it is very important to be an early embracer of a new trend or technology to establish yourself as a market leader and innovator but at this juncture, Facebook is no longer new. Not getting in the game now may really come back to bite you as a missed selling opportunity.

As more people flock to Facebook I expect the numbers to continue to increase. Facebook would have to do something really terrible to stop the trend, and I really don’t expect that to happen do you?