I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, HootSuite has saved my life. Here is a screenshot of my HootSuite account.
As you can see I have many feeds. I have two personal twitters and the ELAN twitter, plus Facebook. As the Social Media Chair for ELAN, it is very important that I keep these separate. It is easy to tweet on the wrong account and it can get frustrating managing multiple twitters, which is the reason I originally got HootSuite. What I didn’t realize is that HootSuite would allow me to be so much better at Twitter!
Essentially, HootSuite allows you to put the people you are following into categories that are easier to search than one long feed. Then you can actually filter theses categories by keywords. I use this function to look for jobs and internships, which I post to the ELAN twitter every other day at 8pm. I have my feeds sorted by type of connection: Emerging Leaders Network, Eugene Related News, Arts Organizations and Arts & Administration News. This helps me scan each feed to find relevant information to re-tweet for ELAN’s twitter.
Though the feature that has saved my life is the ability to schedule tweets. Each time you tweet, you can choose to schedule it anytime of the day. This way I can spend 30 minutes on Twitter in the morning, but it looks like I’m tweeting all day. This has saved me so much time and it has increased traffic for ELAN’s twitter! People are starting to notice ELAN more often and we even showed up in some twitter arts news blogs! Thanks HootSuite! One day, I want to take their certificate program to learn more about how to use this software better.