As many of you know, I have been a huge advocate of using TweetDeck to manage your followers on Twitter. All my Twitter training courses have involved an element of learning how to use TweetDeck. Over the last six months, TweetDeck has changed and improved, so that now it is a powerful and somewhat complex application. I have a number of columns set up on my TweetDeck so that I can easily see what each of those people that I actively follow are saying. I start up TweetDeck in the morning and leave it running all day, jumping in occasionally to add my own tweets or Retweet others. TweetDeck is a great application to manage the process.
Recently though, I have found that TweetDeck has stopped working for one reason or another. The ‘Don’t panic there is a problem’ message appears on a regular basis. What is the reason for this? – it may well be a lack of memory on my fairly old computer, but the only way I have found to get things back to running normally is to logout of TweetDeck, close it down and log in again. Only a few clicks are needed – but it is a bit irritating.
I recently saw a post comparing HootSuite to TweetDeck by Graham Jones . I had looked at HootSuite a few months ago when starting out with Social Media and didn’t think much of it. Perhaps I should have another look.
I have been using Hootsuite for the last couple of days and wanted to share my initial thoughts with you.
Yeah for HootSuite
I like the look and feel of HootSuite. To me, it looks a bit cheerier somehow! I particularly like being able to set up different tabs or sets of columns. I have different tabs for different Twitter usernames that I am looking after. I like the organisations this brings.
In the past I have been a fan of futuretweets.com as an easy to use site for setting up automatic tweets. This has proved to be rather unreliably recently and I was going to start using socialoomph. I am not a huge fan of the socialoomph interface and find it particularly difficult to teach so I think the scheduling facility of HootSuite is great. It is easy to use, though has brought up error messages a few times this morning, so judgement will be reserved until I’ve tested how robust it is when using it for teaching.
Pictures in Hootsuite can be seen immediately in a thumbnail rather than going to a link – makes it all a bit smoother.
Yeah for Tweetdeck
I still like Tweetdeck for the capability to automatically fill in the names of your followers. I don’t always remember exactly how a username is spelt and do like the autofill of Tweetdeck so that you end up refering to the person you wanted to.
I like the autoshorten facility in Tweetdeck. Sometimes if you Retweet a tweet, you have to shorten it to the 140 characters, the autoshorten facility allows you to do this simply. I haven’t found anything similar in Hootsuite.
Jury Still Out
Hootsuite uses owl shortening rather than bit.ly which I think is a disadvantage. I like the fact that bit.ly can be used in multiple applications. Both give similar tracking facilities – though tracking is within the application in HootSuite.
Both applications allow you to easily add people to lists, retweet and reply and use more than one user name.
Summary
So in summary, which do I prefer best? It is swings and roundabouts really – both have great and not so great features. For now, I’m going to test how HootSuite a bit more – the crashing out of Tweetdeck was really starting to annoy me. However, a new version of TweetDeck is rumored to be imminent which should include geotagging. It will be interesting to see what other new features are included and whether HootSuite brings out a competing version.
I would be interested in your thoughts.