I'm continuing to find HootSuite to be a valuable tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts. This morning, I worked with it to keep track of what people are saying about InformationWeek online, and to help my colleagues connect with new contacts on Twitter. If you're in an organization where multiple employees have their own Twitter accounts, and there's also a Twitter account for the brand, you might find some of my experiences useful.HootSuite is a slick tool for managing multiple Twitter accounts. It came along at a good time for my career on Twitter. The @InformationWeek account on Twitter recently grew up, and I discovered HootSuite at the time when I needed a better tool to manage InformationWeek's' presence on Twitter.

I started the InformationWeek account about two years ago, soon after I started my personal @mitchwagner account. I grabbed InformationWeek's' main RSS feeds, and fed them into Twitter using the free TwitterFeed tool. Starting about six months ago, I began to make a concerted effort to increase the @informationweek account's popularity, promoting it on my personal feed and in a couple of places on InformationWeek.com Recently, that effort paid off; the InformationWeek account surpassed my personal account in popularity; both have more than 2,000 followers.

I've been monitoring Twitter for a long time to find out what people are saying about us. I used search.twitter.com, creating saved searches for "InformationWeek" and all the publication's popular nicknames I could think of "InfoWeek," "iweek," "info week," "information week," even "info weak" (what, you think we didn't know about that one?) I output the searches as RSS feeds, and read them using Google Reader.

HootSuite presents a better interface for monitoring Twitter searches. It displays your searches in a more readable format than Google Reader, and it shows them in a place where you can easily reply or re-tweet.

HootSuite's search interface.

To use HootSuite search, click on the home page for a particular Twitter account, then click the "Search" tab. That will bring up a page with a search box. Enter a search term, and HootSuite will show you the results of your search. And HootSuite automatically saves the searches by default, although you can delete the searches manually. That's a nice touch; if you run a search once, you'll probably want to run it regularly, and you don't have to remember to save the search, HootSuite automatically does that for you.

I've set up searches for "informationweek" and one or two of our brand's nicknames. I also set up searches for tweets from each of my colleagues on InformationWeek. That way I can read their tweets from a location where I can easily retweet them from the InformationWeek account, helping them get better exposure and better connect with readers.

One shortcoming to HootSuite's search: It'll recognize simple "and" or "or" or "not" searches, but it won't permit me to use a single, wicked-long search phrase. I tried entering the phrase, from:awolfe58 OR from:briangillooly OR from:cnucci OR from:infoweek_andrew OR from:iweeknick OR from:jfoley09 OR from:johnksiefert OR from:jrusso7 OR from:michaelgrover OR from:michaelsinger OR from:nataliaw OR from:NetEvolution OR from:nicoleferraro OR from:pahlkadot OR from:paulmcdougall OR from:robpreston OR from:stacyo OR from:stephstahl OR from:syegulalp OR from:tasmith369 OR from:tonyuphoff OR from:victoriaharres, so that I could press a single button and output a search containing all recent tweets from all my colleagues. But HootSuite choked on it. I have to run each search individually.

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