Ellen Martin
Hootsuite: Setting up your Tabs & Streams
There are many tools you can use when it comes to organizing, scheduling and monitoring your social media. My favorite tool for Twitter is Hootsuite.

When you organize your tabs and streams right, Hootsuite is an amazing time saver. Here is my favorite way to organize Hootsuite:
I use each tab for a different account I manage. I have two twitter accounts (my personal and my business) plus a tab for each of my current clients.
I start with four of the basic tabs - Scheduled, My Tweets, Mentions, Retweets. These show you what you have planned, what you have recently said and what other people are sharing and amplifying. This gives you a really quick snapshot of your activity on Twitter.

My second set of streams are for people. Using Twitter lists, I add in some of the people who I want to monitor or people who I would like to share content with. I look at this as the people important to that persona. For my Purple Martin @TheSocialMartin channel, I have a stream for my clients and a stream for Important People. Both of these are lists of people I want to interact with on Twitter.
The third set of streams is for topics. Using hashtags, I add streams that act as feeds for the topics I am interested in. By searching hashtags that are relevant.


Lastly, there are certain streams that may come and go or change out. If you really want to keep an eye on your competition then a private list with those competitors would be a great addition. If you are attending or hosting a conference or event with a hashtag - then it would be good to create a temporary stream for that hashtag.
Once you find what topics and people you want to hear from and separate them out with lists and searches, you can get your twitter set up to succeed on Twitter monitoring. Want more help and tips? Sign up for the newsletter. Also follow along on Facebook and Twitter.