Hello, my name is Jayne Corso and I work with Dan McDonnell as a Community Manager for AEA. As a frequent social media user, and one of the voices behind @aeaweb, I am always searching for new tools that can organize my social media feeds and help me stay up-to-date on the latest conversations, topics, and hashtag surrounding the evaluation community.
HootSuite is my primary tool for monitoring industry news and evaluating our social media posts. The ease of access to industry information that that this tool provides makes research much more effective – and easy!
Rad Resource: Manage your Social Media Accounts Through the HootSuite Dashboard
Each HootSuite user has a personal dashboard, which can be customized to fit posting or research needs. The dashboard can manage multiple platforms including: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and WordPress— creating separate tabs for each platform. Each tab can be customized with ‘streams’, (feeds, keyword searches, lists, etc.) so you can curate the most relevant information on one screen.
This is a great way to see how the evaluation community is engaging with @aeaweb’s daily Tweets. The different streams help better identify good times to share posts, what content is most popular, and the best ways to present information. Using these insights, AEA seeks to better connect with the evaluation community on Twitter and other social media channels.
Here is a quick-and-easy guide to adding tabs and streams to your dashboard
Rad Resource: Using Hashtags and Keywords to Follow the Conversation
HootSuite is an excellent resource for staying connected with other evaluators on social media and joining evaluation-related conversations. Add streams to your dashboard that follow keywords or hashtags and HootSuite will search social platforms for the most recent and relevant posts. This is where you come in – jump in, and say hello! Offer your thoughts, insights, and experience to add value to one of the many conversations that are happening. You may just meet some new friends!
Choosing your hashtags depends on the topics you are interested in, be it evaluation (#eval), data visualization (#dataviz), or even helpful excel tips (#exceltip). Hashtags also allow you to follow along with industry events like AEA’s Evaluation 2014. By adding #Eval14 as a stream to your dashboard, you’ll receive the most recent and updated information tweeted and what other evaluators are saying about the event.
Want to learn more? Here’s a helpful resource from Fresh View Concepts on how to set up your HootSuite Dashboard.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.