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HootSuite My Preferred Twitter Client

I have tried all kinds of applications for Twitter but I have ended up really using two HootSuite and SocialOomph. For most Twitter work and my own Twitter use I prefer HootSuite. There are a few reasons.

1. HootSuite is easy to use. You can have a master user and add writer access or other team member access.

2. HootSuite allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts as well as to Ping.fm and Facebook with one click.

3. HootSuite has an integrated link shrinker right in the posting control panel. It uses the Owl.ly URL shortener.

4. HootSuite has a built in statistics portal showing the important click and reader activity for your account.

5. HootSuite now allows you to save posts as drafts and reuse them – this was one of the features I really liked with SocialOomph and now HootSuite has it.

6. HootSuite allows you to schedule your tweets for any day or time in the future. Love that feature!

7. HootSuite shows you the full thread of a conversation when someone responds to one of your Tweets. Now you know what they are responding to when you get a DM or @reply.

Now just to clarify, no one is paying me for this review, I have been using HootSuite for a while and just really like the application. I used to use TweetDeck, but now with needing to manage so many Twitter accounts HootSuite is the perfect user and client-friendly online application for me.

Please note as of 1-16-11, as of today if you click my HootSuite links, they will pay me a small commission if you upgrade to a Pro account, but that is not my reason for liking their product.

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Allison Pest Control Launched

Allison Pest Control New Custom Website
Custom website for Allison Pest Control

We’ve just launched a brand new website for the nice people at Allison Pest Control in Farmingdale, New Jersey. The site took over 130 hours to complete and I believe it is one of our best so far.

The site contains 33 custom created pages chock full of interesting well-written content about New Jersey pests. The website contains a variety of navigation styles as well as an integrated site search feature that make finding any topic easy on the site.

Using the greens and logo from the client’s trucks, we created a custom look that pleased the client and looked crisp and clean. The site is built as an authority website and is geared up to place well organically on local search terms.

With additional service areas created in the new site, both commercial and residential clients will find topics of interest and service information. Adding numerous client testimonials in both the home and business areas helps readers and prospects to better understand the type of services the client, who has been in business since 1917, offers.

The client has already started to get outstanding feedback and is already planning on adding a blog to the website in the next several weeks. We invite you to check out this new website and see what you think at www.AllisonPest.com.

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Twitter Lists – Making Sense of Twitter

Twitter lists are a fairly recent option on Twitter, but I have just not had the time to explore their use until yesterday. Now that I have checked them out I want to share with you how easy they are to use and why you should use lists on Twitter.

First it is simple to set up and add to a Twitter List. Here’s how:

1. Go to your follower page on Twitter. To the right you will see a few icons, one looks like a list. Right click on the icon and a menu drops down. From here you can create a list or simply tick next to an existing list to add that follower to a specific list. You will have the option to make the list private or public. Private is for your use only. Public allows others to actually subscribe to your special list and follow who you are following on your “short list”.

2. Set up list to group your followers. Some of my lists are clients, team members, SEO stars (people in my industry who are interesting to follow), and Interesting people. Those are just my lists, the ways you sort your own Twitter followers is totally up to you.

3. Then work your follower list and sort your followers by list. I have over 900 followers and it took me about 15 minutes to sort them. Not everyone is on a list. People who I really liked to read I have now been able to reconnect with as their tweets had been hidden in the “pile”.

4. Now this is the best part as far as I am concerned. Now add your lists to HootSuite with one click. Just select to add a new column in HootSuite and select the list you want to have appear in the column.

What Twitter lists do for me is to allow me to really watch people who I want to watch by pulling their Tweets into a separate section both on Twitter and on other applications like HootSuite.

Some of you who are reading this post may say “that’s why I use TweetDeck!”, but if you are like me and manage many Twitter accounts for clients TweetDeck simply doesn’t cut it. You can only see one profile at a time try to manage five or six full Twitter accounts with all the columns needed and you will see TweetDeck is just too restrictive. This is why for me HootSuite is best. I can set up a separate HootSuite account for each client and view all information when I want to and now can follow lists of top followers for each client.

If you are just managing your own Twitter account, TweetDeck is fine and in fact Twitter Lists are really a “knock off” of the features that have made TweetDeck so popular and the reason why many people have flocked to TweetDeck. With Twitter embracing lists other applications like HootSuite are now able to show this functionality that make sense of all the tweets you get when you are active on Twitter.

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Should You Have a Privacy Policy on Your Website?

The answer is unequivocally YES you should have a privacy policy on your website.

There are several reasons why every business owner should make sure that this is one of the pages they include in their website.

  1. If you advertise on any Pay Per Click platform, the spiders which measure quality score will be reviewing your website looking for this file.
  2. If you link out to any websites from your website, you need to cover yourself legally and make sure that visitors know you cannot control what those other sites do from installing malware, to showing photos you may not approve of, or sharing comments or points of view you don’t share.
  3. In our litigious society, it is unfortunate that you have to also cover your proverbial “butt” by having that hated legalese language that makes you “law suit resistant”.
  4. Additionally it also helps your readers to know what you do with their email addresses and information. Do you share the information to third parties, do you sell their email to spammers? It is by far better to be transparent in regards to what you do to build confidence and a relationship built on trust with your readers.

So, if you don’t have a privacy policy, here is mine as an example for you to review. You may want to consider creating one that is similar to help keep your business “covered”.