Chris Spagnuolo’s EdgeHopper

I recently wrote a short guide called How to Use TweetDeck a few weeks back. While TweetDeck is an awesome desktop client for Twitter, there are several things missing from it that make it fall just short of being the perfect Twitter client (but I still couldn’t live without it). Some of those short-comings are lack of support for tracking multiple Twitter profiles, scheduled Tweets, multi-editor support, and click-through statistics for shortened URLs. When looking for a solution for some of these features, I found my latest favorite tool for Twitter: HootSuite. HootSuite is a web-based tool that offers lots of goodies for power Twitter users. Let’s take a look at some of the cool things you can do with HootSuite.

Manage Multiple Twitter Profiles

One of the first things you’ll notice about my HootSuite dashboard is that there are multiple Twitter profiles being managed from my HootSuite account (two are fakes I’m using for this demo).

From, the HootSuite dashboard, we can get a quick glimpse of the recent activity on each profile. You can also quickly create a new Tweet from any of the profiles by clicking on the Create New Tweet button on each profile. Adding a new profile to your HootSuite account is as easy as clicking the Add Twitter Profile button in the upper right and filling in the short Add New Twitter Profile dialog:

You’ll notice that the dialog allows you to select multiple-editors for the profile, a feature I’ll discuss a little later. The ability to monitor and manage several Twitter profiles from one centralized location is great, especially if you’re managing a personal profile and other profiles for your company, blog or website. You can manage your profile settings in the Settings area. Simply click Settings in the upper right, and then click on the Manage Profiles tab. From here, you can synchronize your profiles with Twitter and synchronize your avatar as well (something you’ll have to do the first time you set up a profile, unless you like the default Twitter avatar 0_o). You can also edit individual profile login credentials and the editors on the profile. And finally, you can add a new profile or delete any existing profiles from here as well.

Multiple Editors/Users

While we’re on the settings screen, let’s take a look at the multiple editor feature in HootSuite. This feature allows you to create multiple users on your HootSuite account. Once a user is created, they can be assigned to any or all of the profiles on the account. Again, this is particularly useful if you manage a personal profile and a corporate profile. For instance, I may want to manage and track my own personal profile as well as one that I Tweet on for my company. But, I may want other people from my company to be able to Tweet and see stats, etc., for the corporate account, but not my personal account. No problem with HootSuite. Just add them as users and assign them as editors to only the corporate account. Here’s how it works. First, go to the Settings screen and click on Manage Users tab:

Adding a new user is as simple as clicking the Add User button and completing this dialog:

And voila, a new user on the account:

You can now see we have an account Admin (Chris Spagnuolo) and three editors (Dave, Ted, and Luke) that we can assign to our profiles on the account. The account admin by default can Tweet from and access all profiles on the account. So, let’s assign some editors to the profile called 101_owls. We simply return to the Settings screen, click the Manage Profiles tab, click Edit on the 101_owls profile and check the boxes next to the editors we want to allow for the profile.

Done. Now, just Save Changes and Dave and Ted the Editors can now send Tweets and access stats and other information for the 101_owls profile.

Let’s stay on the settings screen and check out the other features you can manage for your entire HootSuite account.

General Account Management

Clicking on the Account tab gives you access to your general account settings. No big surprises here: manage account name, profile info, time zones, email addresses, etc. But one cool feature you’ll notice is the little checkbox that says Enable Auto Initial. This is a nifty little feature that comes in really handy when you have multiple editors. By checking the box and adding your initials, HootSuite pre-populates your Tweets with your initials. If you want keep track of who Tweeted what, definitely use this feature.

Google AdSense Support

The other cool thing you’ll find on the Account tab is support for Google AdSense. You can generate money from your tweets by adding Google AdSense code to enable ads on your Tweet links when you use HootSuite’s ow.ly URL shortener. Simply set up a Google AdSense account if you don’t already have one, set up a 234X60 banner ad, copy the AdSense code and paste it in your account settings like this:

After you enter your Google AdSense code, you can select which profiles you want to apply AdSense to. When you add your Google AdSense code and use the URL shortener from an active AdSense profile, HootSuite adds a banner to the linked website with some ads from Google. Half the time, the banner contains your ads and half the time, it will contain HootSuite’s ads. The banners look like this when linked to from the ow.ly URL shortener:

Tweet Your RSS Feed

The last tab in the settings area is the RSS/Atom Feeds tab. This tab allows you to send automated Tweets when your RSS feed is updated. This is really great if you’re a blogger and want to send a Tweet out to announce your latest blog post. To add your feed for auto-Tweeting, simply click the Add Feed button and fill in the requested information.

You’ll notice that you can select the frequency of Tweets for your RSS updates. You can select 1 through 5 Tweets for selected time intervals that range from every hour to 24 hours. I would recommend not being annoying and doing no more than 1 Tweet every 3 hours. More than that and I think you start to look spammy. Aside from Tweet frequency, you can also prepend these automated Tweets with whatever you like. Just remember that your RSS item title is going to be the Tweet text so plan your 140 characters accordingly. I would recommend that you use something like Blogged: or Latest post: to prepend these Tweets if you want to. Finally, select which profiles you’d like to send these RSS Tweets from. Click Save and you’ve now automated your announcements of updates to your RSS feed.

That concludes Part 1 of our tour of HootSuite. In How to Use HootSuite: Part 2, we’ll cover how to schedule Tweets, Tweet statistics and tracking, date range searches and more.