HootSuite has been around for about a year and a half now, but I’m just now getting on the bandwagon.  For those of you who like me thought it was just another Twitter client, think again.  HootSuite allows you to pull in social media from multiple sources including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare and more.  It arranges the content in a tab based browser experience, so one tab for Twitter, one tab for Facebook and so on.  But for the church planter, the real power of HootSuite comes in its ability to distribute content.  HootSuite features a handy toolbar across the top.

The toolbar allows you to post content and select which social media outlets to publish too.  This is fantastic for quickly updating multiple social media platforms at once.  It also has a scheduling feature that allows you to post the update when you want.  Finally, the toolbar feature a location based Twitter search.  This is a fantastic tool for learning more about your community.  People seem to be pretty raw and unfiltered on Twitter.  You can get a good sense for what people struggle with, where they hang out, what tv shows they watch, etc.  It provides and interesting insight into people you are trying to reach.

While HootSuite doesn’t have as extensive a list of social media platforms to push to as some might like, it does work with Ping.fm.  Ping pushes content to dozens of sites of for you.  So why not just use Ping?  Ping only lets you push content and doesn’t provide the convenient interface to quickly interact with multiple people across different social media outlets.  HootSuite does a good job both bring in and sending out content and could easily be the ideal social media dashboard for church planters.