HootSuite, my favourite social media client, just announced new premium packages designed for business and organizations. Fortunately, they also continu to provide a free version for most customers. But is that free version sufficient for us?

Today my HootSuite client was offline for a while, which was a big surprise. In general Hootsuite is a very reliable service. Fortunately, I was informed this was due to a remarkable update. Some time late I noticed significant changes to the social media dashboard beginning with a completely refreshed HTML5 user interface, plus geo-located search, native Twitter ReTweets, and integrated Google Analytics.

For me Hootsuite was already the best Social Media dashboard for both personal and team based social media management. Today’s improvements prove Hootsuite continuously keeps improving its service.

Two weeks ago Facebook launched a new social plugin (”like” button) that works with the Open Graph protocol as part of the strategy to make the Web more social and personalized. The button spreads across the internet and it’s clear that websites’ owners quickly embraced the new social plugin.

There is already a lot of controversy around the plugin. Some people wonder how it will influence the privacy on the net? Many people feel Facebook will soon dominate most of our online experience. Some don’t like that FB is selling user’s private information to marketing companies. Will it affect Twitter or Digg? How will it change advertising and marketing strategies? Time will tell.

When you open your LinkedIn page to update your status, you will notice a new feature. From today LinkedIn enabled easy sharing of news and links. A nice new feature which enables you to share what’s hot in your domain. It’s easy to share the news with your network. LinkedIn is step by step becoming more social.

Whether or not you are using Twitter, please continue reading. This is not a typical “new on Twitter” post, although it is about Twitter. Last night Seesmic launched a new revolutionary application Seesmic Look. Seesmic Look is a unique way to learn, observe or be immersed in the real-time web. It’s a Windows desktop app bringing together Twitter data with a beautiful design, approachability and ease of use. Even without a Twitter account it enables you to find valuable information and to jump on the hot trends on Twitter. Having a Twitter account your personal timelines will be incorporated as well. The great look and feel of the application makes it a nice to use one. Seesmic Look works on Windows XP, Vista and 7

Apparently, the only constant thing in this world is change. Also social trends change along with the customs and we need to get used to completely different etiquette rules to survive in the jungle of social media. Like with any other form of communication people get to like us or we simply annoy them.

When using social networks we may also offend people and put them off for not following some basic rules of polite behavior. Below I’m presenting the list of practical tips on how to use Twitter in a way that we avoid irritating our potential valuable followers. I hope this list will make things easier for all of us.

The adoption of social media is increasing at high speed. You only have to watch the impressive increase of Twitter and Facebook accounts. They offer both new opportunities and challenges to stand above the crowd. If you listen to all the advice there is hardly any way to escape from it. On the other hand the group of users is still rather small. Besides many accounts are hardly used and there is a big group of very passive users. Depending on your type of business this means you have to analyze carefully where you can meet your potential clients. Because there is still a big chance you have to meet them offline! The social media area might still be a geek domain.

Seesmic desktop based on Adobe Air used to be one of my favorite Twitter clients up to the moment that FleetDeck desktop arrived. Seesmic had too many performance issues, Tweets were missing. Today I received the announcement of the Preview Version of Seesmic for Windows which made me very curious again. The first impression looks promising.

I just noticed that Twitter added a new feature to one of my Twitter accounts. On the Twitter blog I cannot find any official announcement. It looks like Twitter is testing a new retweeting mechanism among several users. The basic idea looks nice. First of all you can notice by an icon that it is about a retweet, but more important is that you directly receive statistics about the amount of retweets.

Some weeks ago we received an invitation @GOYELLO to evaluate a new Twitter related application TweetMiner. Probably you won’t be surprised we receive many of such requests and we are usually short of time to evaluate them all. Anyhow I couldn’t resist testing the application after visiting the website. Although it doesn’t disclose too much information, which is something that could be improved, I became even more curious. What do they mean with: “Bring the best content to your followers. Schedule today’s tweets in 10 minutes. Be the SIGNAL not the NOISE”?