Monday, May 11, 2015

Are You Using BITLY’s & HOOTSUITE’s Additional Tools?

If you’re like me, and I bet you are since there’s a lot of us out there, you use Bitly to shorten a URL link and Hootsuite for scheduling your tweets when you’re away, editing or living life with a capitol ‘L’!

And if your nodding your head, this post if for YOU because like me, you didn’t notice, or maybe got too involved in other stuff to wonder why Bitly’s full title is ‘Bitly Marketing’. I mention this because for me the most obvious advantage of checking Bitly’s performance metrics often are the diagrams that give percentages of every tweet the system formats for you. Click the Bitly tweet you want to check and you’ll see the number of times it was retweeted during the stated time interval and the number of clicks on the Bitly link that takes shoppers directly to your book or product.

Decide to direct Kindle buyers to a specific review, just click that reviews title and it will appear as a unique URL link. Copy that link, shorten it using Bitly’s free system and you can see how many times that book review was tweeted and how many shoppers clicked the Bitly link to check out your book!

Because ‘Bitly Marketing’ takes the guess work out of tweeting and shows you what works, in this entry phase it’s a great tool to use all the time.


Now Hootsuite lets the mega tweeter tweet - depending upon what you’re willing to pay - to hundreds of Social Media sites or groups. The downfall of using Hootsuite this way is threefold;

1. The shotgun tweeter or social media poster is so busy setting the system up that with so much data derived it takes too long to glean the facts so that data is overlooked in favor of the fun of playing the game.

2. Those using Twitter know you have to tweet for others so they’ll tweet for you in this ‘pay to play’ system. Therefore, discovering the metrics might sound iffy since you’d have to sift through all of the tweets you tweeted to find yours, unless – and here’s what I suggest – you post something unique in each of your tweets to identify them. 

3. If the system or the places your shotgun posting to suspect you’re doing this your account can and most likely at some point will be suspended. Leaving you with zero ability to connect with people you became friendly with but not friendly enough to exchange contact information.

In my Tweet Campaigns 4 Christian Books Group and other groups I tweet with its easy for me to see when members tweet for me because I add my @PaulaWordsmith1 to the tweets I posted 4 others. This way I’m able to see if group members are as faithful at retweeting for me as I am for them. Using each groups unique hash-tag, I'm able to visit that Twitter feed and retweet other members’ tweets if I’m not able to post their tweet myself. 

Since it would be a waste of critical letters to add my @ info to my own Tweets when Tweeter does that for me, I can format my Tweet differently, use an unusually identifying marker, or – and this is my favorite – just make sure to check a few times a day to see what’s what. I know that sounds corny but having worked for ‘Creative Data’ and done the now famous ‘Pepsi Challenge’ as well as many other statistical surveys, I know old data is as good as champagne that’s flat. I say that because for data to be valid it must be current and accurate.  

Therefore, looking at your Hootsuite retweets isn’t going to give you the full picture because what you’re looking is broader than that. Chats with likeminded people, whether one, two or twenty who get you and you them can do more to help you than a thousand nameless tweeters. So when you set up your ‘streams’ make sure to add ‘messages' and 'mentions’ and chat back. Checking all streams a few times a day when you’re able to interact with those whose work interests you. Doing what generations before us did by making connections with people who you’d have a coffee with if you could will do more for you than all the stuff being thrown out there because we only get together for a chat whether Facebook or Twitter if there is a connection.  

Lastly, and this is an observation of mine – like the kids in the movie Goonies we need to be looking for the good stuff. Continue to tweet or post the same information and we are most likely deluding ourselves because like those Goonies, most people who don’t know us are attracted to the good stuff! Sure you may see the numbers of retweets on the tweets you’ve been tweeting for some time stay constant. However, with many scheduling your tweets a month in advance on a regular tweet for retweet system seeing that tweet does not mean that a real person who is active on Twitter at that time tweeted it for you.

My best suggestion is that you stay actively involved in Twitter and continue to be creative because whether you’re an author like me, or someone wanting to connect for other reasons unless we stay involved the system may not give us what we want, which is - I believe - to connect with other like minded people who see you as an assist they'd like to cultivate as you do them. 

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