Internet marketing

The cool thing about my hopeful career path is that with the internet evolving as a new form of getting the information to the people, it is becoming a highly relevant to the marketing field. Basically, I get to play with a bunch of fun sites.

Right now I'm learning about HootSuite. It's basically a way of keeping track of all your social media sites. And you can make a universal post that will go to all your sites without having to go to each one. Essentially, it's pretty awesome for an up-and-coming business.

It doesn't seem particularly hard to use. Maybe a little complicated for the computer illiterate but I think even they could catch on quick. So if you want to use social media from a small scale business perspective, this would be a good tool.

Of course, I wouldn't recommend this for personal accounts. Unless you are marketing yourself out of course, such as an artist and the information you will mostly post is something to inform your fans. Otherwise hootsuite seems very impersonal and why would you want that for your facebook or twitter? Of course, for the purpose of looking through hootsuite, I used my personal accounts.

Also, this is just for the free hootsuite, not the premium one. Here is what you get with free hootsuite:

•  Account Ownership for up to 5 social network profiles
• Ability to schedule tweets and status updates
• Ability to auto-update from 2 RSS or Atom feeds
• 30 days of link click-through statistics reporting
• Ow.ly link click-through analytics (including 30 day historical data)

 And here is what you get with hootsuite pro [in addition to any free plan options]

• Own unlimited social network profiles
• Auto-update from unlimited RSS/Atom feeds
• Unlimited historical archive of link click-through statistics
• Unlimited access to social insights tools
• 1 team collaborator
• Access data from Google Analytics
• Access data from Facebook Insights
• View and filter algorithmically determined Influence Scores
• Use custom URL parameters
• Disable ads
• Bulk Message Scheduling
• Create Custom Analytics Reports

Optional upgrades include:

• Ability to add additional team members
• Enhanced customer support with a Service Level Agreement
• Ow.ly vanity URL

The pro plan is only $5.99 a month without the extra upgrades.  There is also hootsuite enterprise but then we move far away from what a small business can afford

Pros:
- can post to a variety of different social media with one site
- shows newsfeed as well as any particulars [like @ mentions on twitter]
- good for major social media sites
- perfect for small business looking into using social media

Cons
- limited in social media sites [facebook, facebook page, twitter, linkedin, myspace, pingfm, wordpress, foursquare and mixi (which I don't know what that one is)]
- unless you know anything a thing or two about RSS feed, that feature is completely useless
- does not automatically update when a new post is made [though it does inform you when new post are made, you just can't see them]