Ginger Reichl

I joined Twitter about eight months ago when the buzz started picking up. I guess I’ve always been an early adopter of technology, but I’m obviously a big fan of communication tools as well.

Since I set up accounts for me (@GingerReichl) and for the agency, Pinstripe Marketing (@PinstripeMktg), I initially found myself logging in and out of both profiles a few times a day to post and to catch up on my stream. Talk about a hassle! I had to find one of the management dashboards that I liked.

After testing several, I settled on HootSuite. This nifty little tool allows me to manage multiple accounts from one location (and one login) using a rather intuitive dashboard. The standard columns include my live feed, tweets where I am mentioned, and tweets I have sent. As you scroll to the right, you can add custom columns to create smaller groups of people, hashtags, keyword searches, and more.

HootSuite also features a built-in link shrinker that converts long URLs into mini “ow.ly” links.  Besides providing more bang for your 140 characters, these links are also trackable within the tool, giving stats on the number of clicks, the referral source, and your most popular link posts.

And like most of the social media tools, it is free.