Social media app review: Hootesuite

Monday, 14 June 2010 00:00

Once you join Twitter, it doesn't take long before you realise that the Twitter.com interface isn't that useful once you get more than a few dozen followers.

After trying and quite liking TweetDeck (TD) for a while, I changed to Hootsuite which started as a Twitter account manager but has  implemented integration with other platforms, including recently - Wordpress.

Hootsuite (HS) is web-based.  You don't have to download an application to your desktop, so you can access it anywhere.

And it's free

Key features:

1. Layout

I don't think HS's presentation is as cool as TD, but the key features are there:

• Display conversation threads - I particularly like this feature because you can see the original tweet(s) someone was replying to 
• You can use it on your mobile phone , but haven't tested this application
• Like TD, you can organise your tweets into columns according to your lists.  
• Group into tabs - either by list or groups of lists, or by social media account

2. Manage Multiple Social Media accounts:

• update multiple twitter accounts at the same time
• integrates with Facebook and Linked in (ie you can view your status updates from within HS).  While you can do updates for Facebook from HS, I prefer to go to Facebook for longer and more meaningful status updates.
• allow multiple users access to accounts
• managing more than one account in TD was frankly, a pain and occasionally I tweeted from the wrong account - HS makes it easy to choose what account to tweet from

3. Manage followers

Via a 'Manage' tab (select People from launch menu) you can:

• manually preview the tweets of someone who has started following you, and follow them back with a click of a button
• view followers and who you are following (by list)
• see who is in what list and add/move people around
• view stats on each of your follows/followers (teets per day etc)

4. Tweet Statistics

One of the main reasons I prefer HS to TD.  HS provide click-through statistics (if you use their url shortener)

You can view stats by individual message so you can see which are more effective, as well as stats on the location of the people who clicked on a link.

5. Schedule Tweets

Another key feature is the ability to schedule tweets in advance.  This is a major time saver as you can plan and write your tweets in advance, or schedule the same update for certain times of the day - then check which one got the most response.

6. You can also:

• see who has re-tweeted your tweets
• send updates via RSS feed
• tweet an article you are reading via the 'Hootlet' popup window
• monitor keywords to keep track of conversations
• search the Twitterverse

So for now, an alternative would have to be pretty good for me to change from Hootesuite. 

My wish list would be a customisable style or theme (I like TD's dark background) and to be able to make the columns narrower.

Update 25 June: Hootesuite have released some new features that use HTML5 - including some funkier themes.....one request answered!.  Along with the ability to create better Facebook status updates but have yet to test that one.