Social Oomph, HootSuite, Twitter Karma - Huh? Twitter tools for leveraging your social media blitz. | E Success Journal • tips for building your business online

Social Oomph, HootSuite, Twitter Karma - Huh? Twitter tools for leveraging your social media blitz.

Twitter has taken the world by storm. Whether you want to grow your business or organize a flashmob dance party Twitter is a lightning fast way to push your messages out to followers and engage people… in 140 characters or less.

Twitter can take a minute to get your head around, but once you do you’ll see the value of having Twitter as one more weapon in your marketing arsenal.

You can do everything manually. That is, you can go in and follow hundreds of people each day and hope they reciprocate. This method does work, but after a while it gets harder and harder to manage who’s following you, who your following, and your direct messages.

You may also have a need to communicate often at regularly scheduled times that would be otherwise difficult for you to do personally. Fortunately there are loads of free and low cost tools to help you.

Today I am going to show you my favorite Twitter tools and what I like and don’t like about them.

Twitter Karma

Twitter Karma is an awesome service for managing your followers. You can bulk follow and unfollow people to keep your follow ratio reasonable. The reason you would do this is because once you are following a certain number of people more than are following you Twitter will put a block on your account.

If this has already happened to you and your stuck checkout Twitter Karma. One thing about this service is that it can take a while.

SocialOomph

SocialOomph, formerly Tweetlater is another killer Twitter app that has both free and premium versions. I really like this application. Here’s some of what you can do with SocialOomph:

Manage Scheduled Tweets and Twitter Account Automation
Delegate the Management of a Twitter Account
View All Scheduled Tweets
Add a New Scheduled Tweet
Vet New Followers
View @Mentions and/or Retweets

You can setup customized automated replies when someone follows you. SocialOomph also has a function that lets you bulk purge your Direct Message box. If you have a lot of followers you know managing direct messages one-by-one can be a real pain.

If you have a blog you can add a blog feed to your SocialOomph account, link to a Ping.fm account, setup keyword alerts, or build on their existing platform using the SocialOomph API key.You can also manage multiple accounts.

SocialOomph also has a number of good tutorials to get you started.

This is definitely my favorite Twitter app. If you do decide to go with the premium version there’s a free trial. If you like the free trial and want to continue the premium service the cost is only something like $29 a month.

Unlike many of the other Twitter apps though SocialOomph doesn’t have a great looking user interface but I think its features outway the unsophisticated looks.

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HootSuite

Hootsuite has a number of useful features which in my opinion are geared more toward professional organizations that may have multiple employees managing the company Twitter accounts. Hootsuite has a very elegant Web2.0 style interface with draggable columns you can create on the fly.

Hootsuite will do everything (i think) SocialOomph will but Hootsuite has a couple of other features that separate it from the other apps. The Hootlet is small app that can be dragged into the bookmarks toolbar of your browser so you can easily Tweet or Hoot interesting sites as you cruise the net.

Hootsuite also has an analytics feature that displays various statistics (I can’t say much more about this feature yet as I am only now diving into it).

Personally, I prefer SocialOomph and here’s why. Hootsuite has a very sophisticated interface. For me, the learning curve is longer. I am busy and overwhelmed with information anyway. If I can find something simple like SocialOomph that does basically the same thing but without the learning curve that is probably what I am going to go with. That said, they are all good tools and it really just comes down to personal preference.

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I hope this was useful to you. If you know of any other good apps please share with others and post a comment.

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15 Comments »

City Sylvester said:

Great information, I enjoyed reading about the different twitter programs other then tweet deck. Keep the good post coming.

# 19 October 2009 at 8:36 am

City Sylvester said:

Don’t forget to add google friend connect to your site, it would definitely help you boost your authority.

# 19 October 2009 at 8:37 am

Kimberly Yow said:

Nice post Doug! I especially liked the comparison between SocialOomph and Hootsuite. Personally, I use Hootsuite. I haven’t tried all of the features that SocialOomph offers yet.

# 29 October 2009 at 12:46 am

Doug Hughes (author) said:

Hi Kimberly, thank you for the comment. I was just looking at your blog. It seems you have a good knowledge of using Facebook for business. Would you care to write a “how to” guest post for my blog about using Facebook for business? Either that, or perhaps I could interview you and record that for a podcast. Let me know ~ Doug

# 2 November 2009 at 4:26 pm

Garrett Miller said:

Great post on effective use of twitter tools and automation! SocialOomph saves lives…

Garrett

# 12 February 2010 at 7:26 pm

Doug Hughes (author) said:

Thanks Garrett, TweetDeck is pretty handy too.

Best,
Doug

# 12 February 2010 at 7:44 pm

Susanna Fera said:

Just found your reviews. I am evaluating social oomph and hootsuite as well. The interface for social oomph is not great. I wish they had better tutorials. They have responded immediately to any questions that I’ve had.

For Hootsuite, that Hootlet is so nifty! I just love it!

Susanna

# 12 February 2010 at 11:41 pm

Doug Hughes (author) said:

Hi Susanna,

Yeah…Hootsuite has a funky UI. I’ve been using another handy app lately called TweetDeck. It’s fun but it sure can be distracting.

# 15 February 2010 at 4:23 pm

Thomas Buck said:

Hi Doug,

This is a bit of shameless self-promotion, but you *did* ask for suggestions for other good tools and apps, and my favourite one is the one I develop: TweetingMachine (http://tweetingmachine.com)

Let me know if you’d be interested in a review copy

Tom.

# 4 March 2010 at 6:07 pm

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# 23 August 2010 at 3:01 pm

James M said:

SocialOomph is one powerful piece of web software. I wrote up a review of my experiences on my website. I highly recommend using SocialOomph for your social media needs. I pretty much use it on a daily basis to stay organized and send out new private DM’s to my followers. It really is worth it to use.

# 3 October 2010 at 8:11 am

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# 23 October 2010 at 3:29 am

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# 23 October 2010 at 3:26 pm

Stu said:

There are other 3rd party Twitter tools on the market including Hoots Suite, Tweet Deck, Tweet Adder and Nutshell Mail and some feedback suggests that these other services may be just as good as Social Oomph, but I couldn’t find anybody saying anything negative about Social Oomph

# 6 May 2011 at 12:24 am

Doug Hughes (author) said:

Thanks for that update Stu. Cheers, Doug

# 21 May 2011 at 9:26 pm