Last year, Paul Cubbon, instructor extraordinaire at the Sauder Business School/UBC, introduced me to Hootsuite when I attended one of his courses on Digital Marketing. I find it an invaluable tool and wonder how I lasted this long without it.

For those unfamiliar with Hootsuite, it's a social media dashboard which integrates multiple streams at a single time. Sign on for free, and you can draw your facebook, twitter, linkedin (and more) profiles onto a single interface.

Hootsuite users can manage, follow, comment, monitor, and schedule posts and tweets all at one go. It eliminates the need to open different windows and more importantly, remember different passwords!

And if you need to monitor keywords, this is the perfect way to go about it. Hootsuite has a 'keyword stream' tool, which allows you to enter in keywords, and then monitor twitter to see who is talking about it. For example, if you enter in the words, 'marketing jobs' into your stream, you will be able to see all the tweets that use these two words. This is a perfect time-saver and allows you to weed out all those unnecessary tweets about breakfast and coffee breaks. I have not tried their 'list stream', but I can see it being equally functional.

Do you use Hootsuite? Write me on usha@writechoiceforyou.com and let me know how it's going.