Chris Spagnuolo’s EdgeHopper

On Monday, I covered quite a bit of the functionality and features of HootSuite. Today, I’ll continue covering the features of HootSuite in Part 2 of How to Use HootSuite.

Profile Dashboards

For each of your multiple-profiles that you manage with HootSuite, you can view an individual profile dashboard:

There are some basic tabs in the dashboard that allow you to view all of your updates, replies and direct messages related to each profile. For each Tweet in the list, you can reply, direct message or retweet easily using the small icons on the top right of each Tweet. You can also view all of the updates you’ve sent and filter the results by those you sent today, this week, this month or this year. And, you can filter the Tweets you see in the Sent tab by specific date ranges.

SCHEDULED TWEETS

You’ll notice a Pending tab in the profile dashboard. This allows you to see all of the pending scheduled Tweets related to this profile. You can see what time the Tweet is scheduled to be posted and you also have the ability to edit the Tweet before it is sent, set an e-mail notification for a scheduled Tweet or delete it before it’s Tweeted.

Speaking of scheduled Tweets, yes, you can schedule Tweets with HootSuite. It’s very easy. Simply create a new Tweet from a profile. In the new Tweet dialog, enter the text for the Tweet, enter a URL to shorten if you need to, and then use the scheduler at the bottom right. Click the Later radio button, set the date and time for your Tweet and if you want an email notification when the Tweet is sent, check the alert me box. Click submit and you’ve scheduled a Tweet to be sent. The newly scheduled Tweet will now show up in your Pending tab on the profile dashboard. This is a great feature if you have specific times you’d like to send Tweets. I’ve used it to send Tweets at times when I’m flying. I can still Tweet even when I’m not there!

TWEET STATISTICS

One of the coolest features of HootSuite is its statistics about each of your Tweet’s click-throughs. When you create a Tweet, you have the option of using HootSuite’s URL shortener ow.ly. If you shorten your URLs with ow.ly, HootSuite can track the number of clicks each of these shortened URLs receives once it’s been Tweeted. When you click on the Stats tab in the profile dashboard, you get a view of of the aggregate statistics for all of your Tweets. These can be filtered by stats for today’s Tweets as well as Tweets from this week, this month, and this year. You can also filter Tweet statistics by specified date ranges.

You get some cool stats like total daily clicks on all of your Tweets, where those clicks came from, and what the top referrers were. It’s not overly robust, but if you’re looking to get an idea if your followers are clicking through on your URLs, this will get you there. By the way, thanks to the Twitter army for clicking some URLs for me so I could show you this sample click data (you know who you are, so, thank you). In addition to getting some basic stats, HootSuite also shows your most popular Tweets based on clicks.

If you want to dig in deeper on your Tweet stats, you can get statistics for individual Tweets as well. First, go to the profile dashboard, and click on the Sent tab. On the right side of each Tweet you’ll notice a little blue bar chart. Clicking on the bar chart brings up the statistics for each individual Tweet. In this example you can see a few days worth of data for a single Tweet.

You can mouse over the days to see specific stats for each Tweet. You can also click and drag over the chart to dynamically define the date range on the statistics chart.

TWEET SEARCHES

HootSuite has integrated Twitter’s search functionality. You can use the HootSuite search to search through your own Tweets or the entire public timeline. If you’ve used Twitter search before, this shouldn’t be too foreign for you. The nice thing is that HootSuite saves your keywords as buttons so you can use them again for future searches. It also provides some out-of-the-box buttons for replies (@yourprofile) and Tweets from your profile (from: yourprofile).

If you’ve never used Twitter search, here are some ways you can used Twitter’s search syntax to find what you’re looking for:

The HootSuite Hootlet

The last cool feature of HootSuite is its Hootlet bookmark toolbar applet. To install the Hootlet, just drag the Hootlet logo to your bookmark toolbar. Currently, Hootlet works in FireFox, Safari, and Internet Exporer.

Once it’s on your bookmark toolbar, just click it to quickly Tweet about the pages you’re browsing. When you click the Hootlet, it will open a Create Tweet window. First, select the profile you want to Tweet from if you have multiple profiles.

After selecting your profile, HootSuite pre-populates the Tweet dialog for you with the title of the page you are browsing, it automatically shortens the URL with ow.ly and appends it to the end of your Tweet. You can edit the Tweet and the URL if you want. You can also decide if you want to send the Tweet now or schedule it for later. Click on submit and you’re done.

So, there you have it, a guided tour of all of the features in the current version of HootSuite. Hope you start using it soon.