“I don’t have time for Twitter” is the phrase I often hear when presenting Social Media for business. Twitter need not take up any more time than face to face networking if you understand why you are using it, who you what to talk to and what is your marketing message. Twitter can help market your business in a number of ways including:

- Brand building. More people know about Concise Training because of Twitter than would know about me if I didn’t use it. I have been given testimonials on Twitter, my tips have been forwarded to others and people know who am I when I walk into a room because my face is on Twitter. The buzz that has been generated about the quality of my training through Twitter has definitely resulted in people approaching me for work and partnerships. I have 2600 people following me – that is 2600 people who get a message when somebody has recommended me……

- Customer Service. There is a good chance that people will be talking about your company whether you are on these social media sites or not. Hopefully they will be talking good things – but do you know if they say anything negative? Your clients are using these sites, you can respond to what they are saying, if you are using them to listen.

- Advertise your latest offers or services. People have chosen to listen to you on Twitter – tell them about your services. Don’t only talk to them about your services or they will soon stop following you, but drop them in every so often.

- Share articles that you have found interesting relevant to your industry – this shows that you are taking a professional approach and are in the right space. You will also get kudos from the people you share – don’t forget to acknowledge them.

- Talk to your customers, colleagues and networking friends. Keeping in touch through Twitter is a great way of finding out what is going on in the lives of the people you know. This allows you to build a better relationship – and as we know, business is all about relationships.

Twitter isn’t for everybody – but have a look before you dismiss it altogether. Make it easy for yourself – use tools (Tweetdeck or HootSuite) to help you manage the people you are listening to and use a combination of real time and scheduled messages.

How do you use Twitter for your business?

As many of you know, I have been a huge advocate of using TweetDeck to manage your followers on Twitter.  All my Twitter training courses have involved an element of learning how to use TweetDeck.  Over the last six months, TweetDeck has changed and improved, so that now it is a powerful and somewhat complex application.  I have a number of columns set up on my TweetDeck so that I can easily see what each of those people that I actively follow are saying.  I start up TweetDeck in the morning and leave it running all day, jumping in occasionally to add my own tweets or Retweet others.  TweetDeck is a great application to manage the process. 

Recently though, I have found that TweetDeck has stopped working for one reason or another.  The ‘Don’t panic there is a problem’ message appears on a regular basis.  What is the reason for this? – it may well be a lack of memory on my fairly old computer, but the only way I have found to get things back to running normally is to logout of TweetDeck, close it down and log in again.  Only a few clicks are needed – but it is a bit irritating.

I recently saw a post comparing HootSuite to TweetDeck by Graham Jones .  I had looked at HootSuite a few months ago when starting out with Social Media and didn’t think much of it.  Perhaps I should have another look.

I have been using Hootsuite for the last couple of days and wanted to share my initial thoughts with you.

Yeah for HootSuite

I like the look and feel of HootSuite.   To me, it looks a bit cheerier somehow!  I particularly  like being able to set up different tabs or sets of columns.  I have different tabs for different Twitter usernames that I am looking after.  I like the organisations this brings.

In the past I have been a fan of futuretweets.com as an easy to use site for setting up automatic tweets.  This has proved to be rather unreliably recently and I was going to start using socialoomph.  I am not a huge fan of the socialoomph interface and find it particularly difficult to teach so I think the scheduling facility of HootSuite is great.  It is easy to use, though has brought up error messages a few times this morning, so judgement will be reserved until I’ve tested how robust it is when using it for teaching.

Pictures in Hootsuite can be seen immediately in a thumbnail rather than going to a link – makes it all a bit smoother.

 Yeah for Tweetdeck

I still like Tweetdeck for the capability to automatically fill in the names of your followers.  I don’t always remember exactly how a username is spelt and do like the autofill of Tweetdeck so that you end up refering to the person you wanted to.

I like the autoshorten facility in Tweetdeck.  Sometimes if you Retweet a tweet, you have to shorten it to the 140 characters, the autoshorten facility allows you to do this simply.  I haven’t found anything similar in Hootsuite.

Jury Still Out

Hootsuite uses owl shortening rather than bit.ly which I think is a disadvantage.  I like the fact that bit.ly can be used in multiple applications.  Both give similar tracking facilities – though tracking is within the application in HootSuite.

Both applications allow you to easily add people to lists, retweet and reply and use more than one user name.

Summary

So in summary, which do I prefer best?  It is swings and roundabouts really – both have great and not so great features.  For now, I’m going to test how HootSuite a bit more – the crashing out of Tweetdeck was really starting to annoy me.  However, a new version of TweetDeck is rumored to be imminent which should include geotagging.  It will be interesting to see what other new features are included and whether HootSuite brings out a competing version. 

I would be interested in your thoughts.