I swear to Thor that HootSuite was eavesdropping on my brain last night. The title of the original draft of this post was “Dear HootSuite, I Love You, Please Change” – but an email arrived this morning that changed all that.
Here’s the story: As social media management tools go, HootSuite and CoTweet are both way up there in terms of team management of Twitter. CoTweet has some advantages for team communication. I especially appreciate the ability to “assign” specific tweets to other team members, and to toggle the on duty/off duty switch, allowing members to work “shifts” when managing a Twitter account. Here’s a screenshot:
CoTweet
But HootSuite has some major advantages over CoTweet, including:
1. Multi-Channel Management.
In addition to Twitter, HootSuite allows you to manage Facebook accounts and pages, LinkedIN status updates, Ping.FM, WordPress, MySpace and even FourSquare. CoTweet allows you to manage…Twitter. These days, I don’t have a single client who’s worried solely with team managing a Twitter account. At the very least they have a Facebook page that requires updating, and if you’ve spent any time trying to integrate your Facebook page with your Twitter account, you know what a tangled web that can be. HootSuite eliminates that problem quite neatly.
HootSuite Social Networks
2. Cross posting.
Not only can I send a single message to several channels (i.e. Twitter stream and Facebook page), I can send a single message to several ACCOUNTS at the same time. This isn’t a feature I take advantage of often, but I can see where it would come in handy in certain scenarios.
3. Attaching pictures.
HootSuite includes a button on the status bar which allows you to attach photos to any status update. CoTweet…doesn’t. Unfortunately, the photo comes through on Twitter as an ow.ly link. I’d like to see HootSuite offer integration of some of the more common Twitter photo sharing apps like TwitPic and YFrog, which would allow users to view the picture in a pop-up when using an external Twitter client, but they have their own self-serving reasons for holding on to your picture’s URL:
Ow.ly Twitter Image
Namely, product placement.
4. Bookmarklet.
Over nine months ago a thread was started on the CoTweet’s Get Satisfaction support page regarding the need for a bookmarklet.
I Can't Get No Satisfaction
Astonishingly enough, it was started by CoTweet themselves. Several people (including me) chimed in saying they could really use a bookmarklet. But nine months later, nothing’s changed. Even more discouraging, there’s been no activity on the thread from CoTweet representatives since the initiation of the ticket, leaving the commenters to wonder if CoTweet is really listening at all.
In terms of my daily workflow (I manage one Twitter account that consists mainly of links), the lack of a bookmarklet has been a major PITA. My workaround has been to grab a bit.ly link first, then open the HootSuite Bookmarklet, and copy and paste the bit.ly link into the HootSuite bookmarklet.
Why didn’t I just go ahead and use the HootSuite url shortener, ow.ly?
Well, that was the original purpose of this blog post. Up until this morning, when HootSuite rolled out some very welcome changes, an ow.ly link created a “social bar” on the linked-to page. This “Evil Page Frame” as my friend Sheila Scarborough called it, created a bar at the top of the page which included sharing links and a ReTweet button. I, for one, prefer to send out links to my audience that are as unadulterated as possible. In other words, it seemed obnoxious and more than a little spammy to ask readers to click on a link that then asked readers to click on even more links. Thankfully, the folks at HootSuite have changed all that. They still have an opt-in social bar on a new url shortener, ht.ly. But ow.ly links from now on will be completely uncluttered. You can read about the changes on their blog.
I still love CoTweet, and I still recommend it to clients. If your goals are to team manage a Twitter account, and especially if you have a lot of customer service or community management issues that need to be handled over the account itself, CoTweet is for you. But now that ow.ly is free of its social bar, I’m switching to HootSuite full time.
