Hootsuite is a Twitter client targeted to small businesses (or users with multiple social networking accounts). It allows you to have access to multiple social networks from one simple/customizable interface. In my opinion, one of my favorite features from Hootsuite is the ability to allow users choose which streams they want displayed on their screen: Sent Tweets, Home Feed, Mentions, Direct Messages (Inbox), Outbox, Pending Tweets and more.
Yes, Pending Tweets. Hootsuite allows you to schedule tweets and have them automatically post at any given time of the day - even if it's one month after or even if you are not online at the scheduled time.
10 Reasons to use Hootsuite:
- It allows you to manage multiple social networks from one interface: Twitter, Facebook Profiles, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, Wordpress, MySpace, Ping.fm and FourSquare.
- Scheduling. As mentioned above, Hootsuite allows you to write your tweets and schedule them for later posting. This is a great benefit since you can plan ahead your promotions, campaigns and deals.
- Collaboration. Hootsuite allows accounts to have multiple editors. For example, if you and your business partner want to both have access to the company's Twitter account and post as desired, you can!
- URL Shortener. Hootsuite has an URL shortener integrated. How does this benefit you? Remember that we are communicating messages to our audience in 140 characters or less; so we want to save as much space as possible, to still be able to say as much as we want.
- Tracking. When using the "owl.ly" URL shortener, Hootsuite will track and keep analytics of each clicked received per link. (Stats are near real time, but may be delayed by up to 15 minutes.)
- Keyword Search.
- Create and manage lists.
- Anyone can use it. Whether you are a Mac, Windows or Linux user you will be able to use Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows you to download their plugins or extensions to your computer from their website [http://hootsuite.com/apps], use their web application (which doesn't require any installation - just a hootsuite account), or go mobile by downloading their Android version [http://hootsuite.com/android] or their iPhone version [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hootsuite/id341249709?mt=8]
- Offers a freemium version which provides the advanced features that the free version doesn't.
- Functional, practical, convenient. To me, one of the most important features - and definitely one if not the most important reason why I became a Hootsuite user was the ability to see all my stream within my screen size without the need of scrolling down, or clicking other buttons to see different feeds or messages.
[Example of multiple streams from our @pinkstudiosnet account which shows them up within my screen size]
Some other existing Twitter clients are: TweetDeck, Twitterfeed, Twhirl, Twitterirfic, Twitterfon, among others.
Which Twitter client do you use?