We have been huge fans of Hootsuite here at Concise for a long time because it offers a good blend of functionality without breaking the bank. Perhaps the most useful feature for a business looking to manage its social media accounts is the ability to bulk schedule social media posts in advance by uploading a CSV file. Nowhere is this more important than with Twitter where posts are shorter and a greater volume is required. Hootsuite has several different membership options:

• Free account
• Pro account – from £7.99 per month
• Team account – from £27.99 per month per user
• Business account – from £69.99 per month per user
• Enterprise account – Bespoke pricing

The bulk scheduling of tweets was always available on all but the free account and for a reasonable fee of £8 or £9 a month you got access to the ability to forward schedule up to 350 tweets. It was brought to our attention recently that this is no longer the case. It appears that in a change of policy, Hootsuite now only offer bulk scheduling to those that sign up for a team account which costs £27.99 a month per team member minimum. In response to finding this out, we quickly checked existing free, pro and team accounts that we have access to and discovered in these that the features available were as they were and what we would expect to see but the Hootsuite website does indeed suggest that bulk scheduling has been withdrawn from the pro account feature list:

Surprised by this move we did a quick check comparing Hootsuite to its competitors and sure enough, for new accounts, you must fork out around US$35 a month in order to get access to bulk scheduling. Thinking about it, this could well be a reaction to changes in the way that Twitter allows apps to work with it. With the closing down of Twitter Dashboard which offered businesses some basic twitter management functions, we would not be surprised to see things like bulk scheduling incorporated into the native twitter app soon.

Because many people want to use this time-saving feature but can’t afford to shell out so much of their hard-earned cash on it, we have collated below some cheaper alternatives to Hootsuite and its competitors that offer bulk scheduling of Tweets:

Buffer – need free account + https://www.bulkbuffer.com/  – although a workaround using the add-on service bulkbuffer, you can use this to bulk schedule for free.

twittimer.com – pro plan needed for bulk scheduling $5.41 per month

twuffer.com  – $5.99 a month for bulk scheduling

We have not used these services ourselves so cannot vouch for how well they work but they all state that they offer bulk scheduling on Twitter for a low monthly fee and appear to be nice and straight forward to use.

Let us know if you have used any of the above and what you think about them or their alternatives.