You know, I'd sort of forgotten that the point of HootSuite is to manage multiple social media accounts. I suspect this is because my social media accounts don't need much managing. While I'm on several social networking sites, I'm on many of them for some other reason than socializing. (Usually databases.) Of the ones I use for socializing, I've only linked Facebook and Twitter to HootSuite. I imagine disaster is inevitable if I connect LinkedIn to anything I use in my personal life.
In general, I should probably use HootSuite more, especially for Facebook. When I first started using it, its bare-bones interface just didn't do it for me aesthetically. But nowadays, Facebook has gotten more and more cluttered with ads that I can pretty much ignore in HootSuite. Worse, its insistance on wanting to show me "top stories" is annoying as all get-out. Even when I switch to showing most recent stories first, it keeps asking me if I wouldn't really prefer top stories, and every few days it switches back to top stories on its own. HootSuite's default is chronological order. I may learn to love that bare-bones interface after all.
But merely reading Twitter and Facebook is standard. Social media management tools need to do more, and HootSuite does. I like that HootSuite lets you post to Twitter and Facebook simultaneously, although I don't use this feature all that much. This might be a more useful feature if I wanted to post the same stuff to three or more social networks, but it's not that much effort to post something in one network, and then copy and paste it to the other. And I don't often post the same things to Twitter and Facebook. There's some overlap between the two, of course, but not that much, and what I want to say to friends (Facebook) is rarely what I want to say to strangers (Twitter). But when I have used this feature, it's been easy to use.
Another selling point for me is that HootSuite has analytics. I love analytics: charts! graphs! trends! It's too bad that my social media life is so unexciting that the analytics don't show much, but the point is that they could. And it would be really neat to look at, I'm sure. I need to go do something interesting online so that I have cool analytics to admire.
HootSuite also lets you write status updates and tweets ahead of time and schedule them for later posting. I've probably used this feature more than any other. It's such a sensible feature that I keep being mildly surprised that neither Twitter nor Facebook has added it to their services. I haven't gotten the hang of AutoSchedule yet, but I'm in no rush—again, I probably don't have enough to say to justify its use.
I don't see myself using HootSuite professionally any time soon. I don't work with my library's social media, and we only have a Twitter account anyway. You don't need a social media management tool when you barely have any social media to manage. But it's been useful personally and I plan to keep using it for the foreseeable future.
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