If you are unfamiliar with Hootsuite, it’s a twitter platform (based out of Vancouver) that lets you manage multiple twitter accounts, schedule your tweets, sync twitter accounts with your team, and track your twitter stats – like how many users are clicking on your tweets. Basically, Hootsuite brings a whole bunch of useful twitter tools together into a single management platform.
In addition to Hootsuite’s regular features, they have released various new features and tools over the past few weeks. Below are the changes that you should be aware of.
Named after the release’s upgrade to HTML5, Hootsuite5 includes geo-searches, new or ol’school RTs and Google Analytics.
Geo-Searches
Geo-searches let you narrow your twitter searches to tweets from your local area, which is useful if you’re looking for resources or people that are close to your location. To access geo-searches, enter your search in the search box and click on the compass image on the right. It will ask you if Hootsuite can access your location, click Share Location, and the search box will show tweets from your local area related to your search:
New or Ol’School RTs
In the past, Hootsuite has used “RT” for re-tweeting messages. It has now integrated Twitter.com’s auto re-tweet function and users can choose whether they want to use the auto-re-tweet tool or re-tweet with “RT”. The difference is that with auto-re-tweet you can’t edit messages and if a message is over 140 characters it will simply get cut off. With the “RT” method you can edit the message to fit within the character limit. The default is the “RT” function, but if you want to set your preferences to auto re-tweet, click on the owl image next to the compose message box and click Settings > Preferences:
From here, select Choose Twitter Web Retweets.
Google Analytics in Dashboard
You can now bring your Google Analytics data right into Hootsuite’s dashboard. This means that if you want to see your twitter stats as well as your site traffic numbers, you can do this all in one place. To access Google Analytics, click on the owl image next to the compose message box and click Stats > Site Analytics. Click Connect to Google Analytics. Choose your Google Account and Grant Access. From here you can choose which websites you want to see stats for and view your statistics, just like you would in Google Analytics:
On Tuesday, Hootsuite released Social Owl, what they call “social relationship and support tools,” which lets you filter your twitter stream by influence or by keyword. Filtering by influence lets you filter your twitter stream using Klout’s rating score. Users are graded from 0 to 100, with 100 being the highest. This feature lets you quickly zero in on influencers to target in your campaigns.
In addition to being able to set up columns for keyword searches that you always want to be tracking, you can now filter columns “on the fly” by keyword. This helps focus your twitter stream and is great for tracking hot topics.
To access either of these new filters, click on the arrow on the rightside of the green bar at the top of your column, click Filter by… From here you can choose to filter by either keyword or klout score:
Coming Soon: Premium Paid Packages
Within the next few weeks Hootsuite will be launching a new freemium model where premium users, such as Conde Nast, Banana Republic and Dell, can have access to extra features. The paid plans will include:
- Unlimited social networks
- Unlimited RSS feeds
- Team members on social networks
- Advanced analytics & reports
- Expedited support
No prices have been released yet, but it’s interesting that more and more social tools and platforms that started out free are adding paid elements. Just this week, it was announced that Reddit has changed its business model to freemium. What do you think about Hootsuite moving towards a freemium model?
