10 Twitter Hacks! MAXIMIZE Your Hootsuite Usage

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Entrepreneur Tools, where I highlight my favorite tools that I use to run my business. Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite apps that I use, and it's Hootsuite for my iPad. And what I find this, uh, very helpful to do is to manage my Twitter account. When I'm on my laptop or my desktop at the office, I'm usually using Hootsuite to manage all my Twitter accounts anyway. But I find when I'm mobile, or I'm at a conference or a coffee shop and I wanna connect with Twitter, I find that the Hootsuite app is very helpful. And I'm gonna quickly show you how I use it, and hopefully there's some ideas for you to be able to implement it for your business as well. So this is Hootsuite. I've loaded it up here on my iPad. I'm gonna probably zoom in a little bit so it may be easier to read all the different things that are happening here. Yeah, it's a little too much. There we go. So we'll back up and I'll just move it down here so we can see. So this is my Hootsuite, and at the top you can pick basically the different fields that you want to use. So the first field that I have is sent tweets, and these are the tweets that I've sent. This is helpful just to know that anything that I've scheduled is actually going out okay, and that I can see, you know, if I need a history of my my tweets. So you can put that there, up to you if you want to include it or not. The next one that I have over here is family, and so these are tweets that, you know, if I wanna follow up with somebody on, it's fine. So this is my sister who's talking about health startups that I can respond to her if I want. So again, easy way to be able to set things up. These are through custom lists. So the sent tweets, the first one is done by Hootsuite. It's one of the automatic filters you can put in there. The second one is if you create a custom list, and you can do that through Twitter. Any person that you want to, you know, stay in touch with and build a list, you can just add them to the list, and then in Hootsuite, say I want to import that list and have a custom column for it. So in this case, it's my family, and so this is my sister Alexandra, and I've added her to my list. And so anytime she tweets, I have it here as well. I can always see what she's up to. So, you know, here she says she's been Having some berries and pumpkin seeds for dinner. That's great. I can write back if I want to. That's a great way to just to stay in touch and see what's happening. The next list that I made was for business. So these are some of my business contacts that I stay in touch with and just see what they're up to. So Tasha, David, a couple more. If we scroll down, we can see, you know, more different tweets. And up to me again if I want to stay in touch with these people and send them a note or not, just see what they're doing. And again, you know, quick, easy way. So this is another list that I made called Business and just business contacts that I want to stay in touch with. A lot of the business contacts that I have aren't necessarily on Twitter or don't have a personal account, so it may be hard to add them on here. But if they do, it's a great way to just stay in touch and see what people are up to. And if you, you know, have a reason to connect with somebody, it's easy to show it here. Through that list. So it's a great idea to have different lists for different contacts. Some of them may be more important than others, and so to make sure you don't lose the stream of people that you're connecting with, you can easily import your list into here. The next thing you can do is also do it based on keywords. So the first two lists, one was for my family, one is for business. The next thing that I have here is for certain keywords. So this is usually, uh, I set this up for keywords that I'm tracking, usually for people who want to be on Twitter or should be on Twitter. I've kind of convinced them to join, but they're not sold on the idea yet. So I've helped them set up accounts, we've got some tweets going on, but they're not really monitoring their account, so I'll help monitor it for them quickly. You know, if it gets to the point where it's too crazy to manage, I'll hand it over to them. But basically I'm tracking their key name and any important words that may be relevant to their business. And it's a great way for me to be able to let them know that, "Hey, somebody just tweeted about you or mentioned your name or mentioned your company or talking about your industry." And I use that as a way to stay in touch with people as well. So if you have any keyword that you're looking for, again, it could be to recognize somebody, but it could also be for your own business if there's certain keywords that are important. Anytime somebody tweets about it, you can set up that custom search, and then you'll get the list of all the people who are tweeting about it, and you can respond. Again, most of the stuff I'll do from my desktop, but it's great great, especially when you're at a conference. You may be there for a couple days or you're traveling and you can't get access easily from a computer. Just pop up the iPad, load up Hootsuite, and you can get all the terms that you want right there. And then another one— oh, we'll close that up— another one here is mentions. So these are people who talk about me, so they've mentioned my name for whatever reason. And these are, I find, really important. This is why I'm really on Twitter and why it's important for me to kind of stay on top of what's going on, because these are people who are trying to talk to me and it's important that I respond, at least to some of them. So some of them may be, you know, junk. You know, the first one there says, "Follow me back." Somebody said, "Thanks, good to know." You know, you don't have to necessarily respond to everybody, but it's up to you to pick what might make sense. So here's an example. This guy here is Andrea. We've been working on a little project, and he says here, I'll let you know soon when I will be in front of my laptop. So if you want to respond to somebody here, so this is a good example, I could just click on him and click on reply. Let me move this over so you guys can see what's happening here. So this is his message. If I want, I can retweet it, I could set it as a favorite, there's other options. I could look at his profile if I want to learn more. But right now I'm gonna click Reply, and this will pop up, and it says his @name, and he said he's gonna look at it on his laptop, so I'll just say, "Thank you!" exclamation mark, and then click on the Send button, and that'll go off to him. So it says Message Sent, so it's good, it's gone. So it's a great way to be able to quickly update anything, uh, if you need to respond to people. So the last thing I use it for is for hashtags. This is similar to the search, and this is very important when you're at a conference. A lot of times at different conferences, you'll see that they use hashtags and people are tweeting about the event. So if you want to keep track of what's going on, or if you want to add your own comments to it, you can do a search term for the hashtag. So I put one in here. This was for SESTO, was a conference that took place in Toronto Search Engine Strategies for Toronto that I was media at and was covering, and so I was tweeting with the hashtag and seeing what people were writing. So this is great if you have internet access at the conference to be able to quickly see what other people are writing, respond if you want, get involved in the conversation, and kind of keep that live feed going. Now it looks like this is something completely different now, this hashtag. It looks like it's, uh, something Italian, so maybe not relevant anymore to what I was doing, but If you're ever at an event and there is a hashtag, it's a great way to be able to quickly see what people are writing, get involved. I've set up lunchtimes using a hashtag. Somebody talks about a— they tweet a message and I agree with it or disagree with it and I tweet them back and say, "Hey, why don't we have lunch together or have a coffee and talk about it?" So it's a great way to stay in touch and see what's happening in the conversation at that conference. So those are the quick ways that I use it. I find it really helpful again when I'm mobile that I use the iPad to quickly see what's going on. So again, I use it for if I'm at a conference using a specific hashtag. I use it to track my mentions when people are talking about me. I use it to track specific keywords that I want to track and stay on top of. I'll use it to track my different lists. So this is a business list and this is a family list. And then I'll also use it to track sent tweets that I use. That I've posted out from my account. So hopefully that helps. That's how I use Hootsuite. I found it to be really helpful, a great way to stay on top of my tweets, especially when I'm mobile. I'd love to hear how you guys are using it. So if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. It will make me want to do more of them for you and share more tools that might help you grow your business. And if you have any questions or comment about Hootsuite, or if you want to share what you're doing, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. I always read those and I always try to respond to everybody. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.