“Hoot” for Hootsuite? Yes!

Once you’ve started using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Ping.fm, and a few others, it’s hard to keep track of everything.  Especially when you open multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. Here’s where Hootsuite comes into play.  

Unlike Tweetdeck and Seesmic that make you download their apps to your hard drive/desktop, Hootsuite is web based.  Therefore, Hootsuite is available pretty much anywhere you have internet access. This gives Hootsuite a slight advantage at the moment to the aforementioned.  

Hootsuite has a fairly easy layout.  You can add “Streams” to view all of your feeds such as your twitter mentions, a Facebook post, or even you LinkedIn follows. The option to use multiple “Social Networks” i.e., your three Twitter accounts and that

Facebook account/page you want to hide from your Mom.  A box that reads “Compose Message” is where your 140 character master pieces come in handy for Twitter.  Should you decide to go over 140, it will truncate it for you, meaning, it cuts it off at the 140th character.  Note that Facebook allows for 420 characters. Before you decide to send off your first tweet or FB post, I suggest you add columns that allow you to follow what you’re doing on within each account.  

Hootsuite’s “+Add Stream” button lets you decide what types of feeds you would like to see from your social media accounts.  Pretty nifty too, since you can see who’s been tweeting about you via the “Mentions” stream, and view your latest FB friends’ posts.  

A unique feature that Hootsuite supports is the ability to Tweet/FB post into the future.  Hootsuite can “hold” a tweet until a specified time.  For example, let’s say you want to be the first person to tweet “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” to your friend in New York.  You can set this time in Hootsuite to hold your tweet until 12:00 a.m. on the date specified.  And……voila…..it’s like magic!  But, unfortunately not real magic.

Overall, Hootsuite has some great tools that I will continue to utilize.  Its accessibility and ease of use are the two most important reasons why I would suggest it for even the novice social media user.  

Feel free to post your feedback of this overview.  Cheers!  

1 year ago  /  1 note