Tweetdeck I’m Breaking Up With You Or 10 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Hootsuite

I use many social networks including Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn on a regular basis but I don’t always have time or don’t like (I’m looking at you Twitter) going to those sites to update my status or engage with others in my network and so I became a dedicated and vocal supporter of Tweetdeck as it allowed me to update my Twitter status, Facebook status, update Fan Pages and my LinkedIn network. I used Tweetdeck exclusively for an extremely long time but over the course of time our relationship soured and as relationships often do I found that the quirks that I first thought to be cute and quaint were now grating on my nerves.

I’m sorry Tweetdeck but I haven’t been faithful, I’ve met someone new, someone with a cleaner interface, built in analytics, browser plugin and someone who allows for team collaboration and includes many essential features businesses using social media need. So Tweetdeck here is my break up letter to you or put another way here are 10 reasons you should be using Hootsuite instead:

1. Team Collaboration – With Hootsuite you are able assign team members to a social networking account and allow them access to post to the brand/businesses Fan Page or Twitter accounts. This is a great feature for customer service accounts or brands with large social media teams that need to collaborate on one account but need multiple user access.
2. Assignments – Working hand in hand with team collaboration is the new feature recently added assignments. Assignments work by allowing account managers who monitor the social networking accounts for their business or brand to send out an notice to other team members alerting them to any issues that may have popped up regarding that brand. This is an effective way to make sure that a business or brand responds to all positive and negative feedback in a timely and efficient manner.
3. Layout – Hootsuite uses a multi-column, tabbed layout that is extremely easy to use and navigate. This allows you to create a tab that contains all of your Twitter lists, another for tab keywords you are currently monitoring, another for your Facebook accounts and another for your Fan pages. This type of information separation allows you to work more efficiently and makes social media monitoring extremely easy to do.
4. Social Network Choices – Hootsuite gives you a ton of choices when it comes to which social networks you want to manage including: Twitter, Facebook, Facebook Fan Pages, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, WordPress, MySpace and FourSquare.
5. Send Later – This is one of my absolute favorite features found within Hootsuite. With the send later feature you can place your social networking status updates into a queue to be posted at a later time and date. This allows you to make sure that your content will be posted at various times during the day to ensure that individuals in other time zones can view your updates.
6. Hootlet/Browser Plugin – The Hootlet and the browser plugins are invaluable tools that allow you to quickly send out and share links to those in your network simply by clicking on the plugin icon or using the Hootlet.
7. RSS Integration – If you run a blog or a website that uses RSS feeds and you want to make sure that the fans, friends and followers in your network are always aware when your site is updated Hootsuite make this incredibly easy. All you are required to do is add your RSS/Atom feed into Hootsuite, tell it which social networks to notify, set some options for when Hootsuite should check to see if there has been updates and include some additional text and click save and Hootsuite will take care of the rest.
8. URL Shortner – In order to fit URL’s into a 140 character message you will most likely need to turn to a URL shortner to squeeze the URL into a smaller character count. To ensure you have this ability and don’t have to turn to a 3rd party to accomplish this Hootsuite comes built in with two different URL shortners. The first ow.ly just shortens the link the second ht.ly shortens the link and comes complete with a feature rich bar that is added when the link is clicked on.
9. Statistics - Need to show your boss or even prove to yourself ROI? Hootsuite comes built in with a fantastic statistics and analysis area that allows you to track both an overview of clicks on your links as well as track statistics for individual tweets. Options to print out your stats as well as download them to CSV are also included.
10. File Uploads – Similar to how Hootsuite included a built in URL shortner they also allow for image uploads directly from within the application. The image is then uploaded to Hootsuite and assigned a shortened URL to make it easy to share on Twitter.

This isn’t a complete list of all the features found within Hootsuite but it is a list of some of the features that made me switch from using Tweetdeck to Hootsuite without looking back. Like almost everything Hootsuite isn’t perfect and it does have it’s flaws and there are a couple of features missing that I would love to see included in the product. One feature that I would absolutely die to see included with their Send Later feature is the ability to schedule the same update to be sent out multiple times much in the same way that Objective Marketer currently already does.

Do you currently use Hootsuite? If not what is your preferred social media client?