TweetRoost Manages, Remembers Twitter Posts

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Social media management tools that let you post, tweet, and monitor multiple profiles are nothing new, but the TweetRoost product being launched next week aims to help companies do a better job of remembering it all.

The first product from MediaRoost emphasizes tracking, sorting, and saving the messages a company broadcasts, as well its mentions by other Twitter users, Mark Krieger, president and chief architect, said in an interview. Krieger and co-founder Fred Pack previously started another company, UniPress, and sold the firm and its FootPrints service desk product to Numara Software in 2006.

"We not only want to do the typical things for the marketing department, but also put in enough features, based on our experience with enterprise-level technology, that we can also have the service desk kind of functionality in TweetRoost," Krieger said. In addition to broadcasting to multiple profiles and monitoring social media mentions, TweetRoost users can assign follow up tasks for sales leads, service inquiries, and complaints that demand a response, and those assignments can be fed into sales, service, and project management tools such as Salesforce.com, ZenDesk, and BaseCamp, for starters.

TweetRoost might seem late to the social media management party dominated by players like HootSuite and TweetDeck. Krieger said ExactTarget's CoTweet is probably a closer competitor, and he also mentioned MediaFunnel.

Still, Krieger said he believes these products are missing "a few high-level features" that TweetRoost provides. In particular, the way TweetRoost saves both outgoing and incoming tweets for follow up is significant because Twitter feeds and searches are so ephemeral, he said. "If you want to see how you answered something a month ago or a year ago, good luck finding that on Twitter," he said.

With TweetRoost, you get your own copy of all that data, and you can see it organized into threaded conversations rather than just a stream of time-based posts. Combined with the ability to annotate archived posts and assign them for follow-up, TweetRoost can help companies manage their Twitter presence in a much more organized way, he said.

TweetRoost Pro is $14.95 per user per month and can be used to manage up to 25 Twitter accounts, with multi-user features like the ability to assign incoming tweets to different users for follow up. The free edition is for a single user (so features like assigning tweets to someone else aren't even relevant) and is limited to managing three Twitter accounts. Other features reserved for TweetRoost Pro include ongoing monitoring for search keywords, archiving of incoming tweets, and integration with Salesforce.com, ZenDesk, and BaseCamp.

Krieger said he has no immediate plans to extend the product to also cover Facebook and other social media sites, although the company name MediaRoost was chosen to provide that flexibility for the future.

"We've looked at both Facebook and LinkedIn and, technically, it's a relatively easy thing for us to do. But strategically a lot of the benefit of the feature set we provide is already in Facebook -- they have the ability to have multiple administrators" for a Facebook page, he said. For the same reason, he thinks many of his competitors say they support multiple social media sites, but put most of the emphasis on Twitter because that's where the need is greatest, he said.