Tweet on time - with klout

Have you discovered the power of Twitter?  You might notice that I tweet about all my blog posts and sometimes retweet other people's ideas.  You might have found this post or indeed this blog via Twitter.

Since the aim of my posts is always to bring you something surprising (and hopefully I sometimes succeed) it is not enough for me to mention something that you could hardly have failed to notice. So I will mention some other things about Twitter that might not have encountered.

At my place of work - a place that I sometimes feel quite proud of - Twitter is banned.  That seems quite reasonable.  We wouldn't want everyone tweeting all the time.  They have work to do.  However, a few of my colleagues working in public relations do use Twitter officially, and since they follow many of the people who follow them, they have expressed surprise that I sometimes tweet during the day.  My esteemed friend and loyal follower, Derby Skeptic, asked almost the opposite question.  "Are you on the web all the time?"  Neither had reckoned with a nice little web tool that I have been using, as recommended by The Honest Blogger.  I ignore her implication that the rest of us might be less honest and appreciate her advice. :)

Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) is a nice free package that allows you to schedule your tweets.  I have been using it for a few weeks and noticed that it brings in readers from all over the world.  But it is more than just a scheduler.  It allows you to run more than one Twitter account at a time (which I don't, but I might).  It also allows you to see (on one screen) tweets coming in from people you follow, your @mentions, your sent tweets and your direct messages or whatever you like.  You see each of them in a column which updates as often as you tell it to update.

You might not realise that you have something called 'Klout'.  With www.klout.com you can get an indication of your ability to influence social networks.  Hootsuite shows the klout of your contacts and can tell you your own score too.  I hear that only one person has a klout of 100 (but I am not young enough to remember his name).  There are others in the 90s, including Lady Gaga.

OK - my klout has only reached 43 but seems to be rising slowly.  I think a good target would be to keep my klout higher than my age.

Small note: I can also schedule these posts to go out while I am at work.  I make a point not to blog from work.  Then I can be as controversial as I wish without embarrassing anyone else.