HootSuite 2.0

Well stumbling upon the upgrade of HootSuite 2.0 yesterday was quite serendipitous – as so many things are on the web these days.  I had twiddled and fiddled a bit with TweetDeck and Seesmic, and was an early user of Thwirl as well.  Nothing quite fit the bill for what I needed to do – until now!

HootSuite 2.0 is the “it” Twitter management tool for me!  It allows management of multiple profiles while simultaneously managing groups that are stored under tabs for more specific segmentation of information.  For me this is the answer I have been waiting on!  I follow people on Twitter for information related to social media, which is what I do for a living,  as well as politics, non-profits and civic groups, and real estate.  I also follow news related to Virginia, Washington DC, business and politics.  With HootSuite’s platform I can segment each type of news I’m following and put the columns next to other groups that are relevant.

Another amazing feature is the ability to track keywords and hashtags.  Each column will accommodate up to three words or phrases.  In addition to monitoring terms you are interested in tracking for your company name, brand or industry, this allows you to track events like conferences where people are tweeting around a very specific subject for a short period of time. I’m so excited about this particular feature and the ability to put those search results next to a column of people I am following on a regular basis.

Hootsuite 2.0

The one drawback  I’ve encountered so far is that the groups are limited to 50 users.  For those who are following thousands, this forces the creation of multiple groups of similar users.  The “upside” of that limitation is that you have a manageable number of people to follow in any one group, and it means refining a bit more how they are being grouped.  This has not been a major impediment at this point and I’m finding that using the tabs and scrolling the columns gives me rapid access to an extraordinary amount of information that is pre-filtered for its content.

I have only 24 hours of experience with HootSuite so I won’t say that I’m an expert on its many features.  I’m just thrilled to have a tool that makes the information on Twitter far easier to manage with less investment of my time.  What it hasn’t yet figured out how to do is overcome the FAIL WHALE!  When Twitter is down so is HootSuite, and that is true of all of the third party applications.  So far I’ve gotten this message only once today “Twitter API server is busy, please try again later.”

I highly recommend that you give HooteSuite a try.  This is truly the Twitter management tool I have been waiting for!