Not me.  A client said that.  Well she said that at the beginning of a consultation and then she said something different at the end.

Her boss believes in social media and their company has Facebook groups and a Twitter account and a policy of posting something to Twitter at least twice a day.  But her problem is that she hates Twitter.  And to a certain extent I can sympathize with her.

It is almost comical how many times people’s new Twitter profiles start with posts that look like this:

“Hello Twitter.  I’m finally here!!”

And then about 20 minutes later they post “Now what?!”

Twitter.com itself is frustratingly difficult to do anything with.  It looks very clean and friendly, but try and find someone to follow and see just how soon you want to give up.  Unless you know exactly who you want to follow, or you just randomly follow people who are following other people, it seems impossible to find themes or key words or strategic follows effectively.

Another recurring problem is what we should be posting in Twitter.  How is it different to a blog?  To what extent are you sharing information versus marketing your company?  I will come back to these questions in another post, but let me tell you what I showed this struggling Twitterer.

I introduced her to an option of using one of two dashboard type applications that can access Twitter, instead of going directly to www.twitter.com.  It took a little while to assure her that she was still actually going to be using Twitter, that her existing followers would still be there and nothing essentially would be changing except that she would be accessing the information of Twitter from a different place.

So we opened up Tweetdeck and Hootsuite.  I normally choose Tweetdeck myself.  As a dashboard, it has various columns that separate the Twitter activity to make it more manageable.  And beyond just the Twitter activity, it can also handle your Facebook and LinkedIn updates too.  In fact you can post status updates directly to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn from Tweetdeck.

But it is in terms of searching that both of these are really so good.  You can create, and later easily delete, multiple columns for search terms, for anything you are looking for.  You can search for key words around your industry, geographic region, people or companies in your industry etc and have these columns in front you simultaneously.  As you see what comes up and you scan quickly through the junk.  Then you decide if there are any Twitters, (Twits, people posting Tweets) that you wish to follows.  Furthermore, in terms of research, you can find other specific information that you could use for marketing.  For example, you can track what your competitor does and make sure you do something different.  You can see what your main clients or prospects are marketing and ensure your products or marketing compliment theirs or sync with their needs.  When someone in your geographic area mentions a need or a crisis, and you can respond first, then you will be seen as a proactive and responsive company and a solution provider.

Tweetdeck and Hootsuite allow this sort of functionality but Hootsuite offers two other cool tools that I love playing with.  One is the Hootlet, a small application that you can pull onto your task bar and that allows you to post any website as a Tweet whenever you come across something that you want to share with your Twitter followers.  So imagine you are reading a good blog post, that is totally relevant to your own followers and you believe that the information would be valuable to them.  Rather than copying and pasting, typing etc, all you do is click on the Hootlet in the Toolbar, and all the info will immediately pop up in the Tweet ready to post.  You can edit and add your own comments, but it makes it so quick and easy.

Another excellent feature of Hootsuite is the option to post your tweets at a later stage.  In fact you can sit and prepare a whole series of tweets, set them up to post later in the week and then get on with your work.

Needless to say, at the end of the consultation, the client had changed her tune.  She couldn’t wait to get in front of her computer, play around with Twitter, via Hootsuite, find some people to follow and start posting tweets.

In fact, she and her colleague almost ignored me for about 5 minutes while they started thinking of all the things they could be posting, all the people they could start following, and all the ways that what they did on Twitter and the blog would influence other parts of the business.  They were really starting to think laterally and in terms of how social media means to market, not just to your prospects or your clients, but also to your internal staff, and to draw on existing resources as well as suppliers in your industry.  It was fascinating to watch them have this discussion.

Like all good things, it just takes some help and training to find the direction required to use a good tool really well.  Social media applications have awesome capabilities for our businesses, but can be equally as frustrating if we don’t know what to do with them.

So from hating Twitter to eager to explore all the opportunities that were suddenly available to her and her colleague, in a short consultation – I think I achieved my goal!  Let me know if I can show you some tricks too.