It took me a while to get aboard the Hootsuite application. My interest towards this application really emerged once I was in a position of handling more Twitter accounts than one man can handle. I have tried a few among the most popular apps, but Hootsuite got the most of my attention because
- You have a master account
- It’s integrated to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ping.fm (among others), and
- The application has an Android app.
The Android app costs $2.99. There’s a free version but it limits your experience to three Twitter accounts, which is nonsense in the context of using Hootsuite. Beware, this might be a temporary thing, but when I tried to log in the first time, I had to retry something like 15 times: It’s depressing, mostly since you pay for the app, but just keep logging again and it will come.
As I mentioned above, the first plus of Hootsuite for Android is that you only have to enter your master account logins, and all your Twitter profiles pop up instantly. Scroll up and down to browse all of your profiles. Each profiles (tabs) show streams (home feed-replies-DM-pending-…) that you can individually edit or remove.
You can add new Twitter to your master account from your Hootsuite mobile application. The application also lets you schedule any tweet you composed via your phone. This can be convenient when you open Twitter 30 minutes every 6 hours, but you don’t want to send all your tweets on the spot. With Hootsuite, you can spread them evenly if you want.
The sweet spot is around tabs and streams. Typically, each tab is a Twitter account, and their containing streams are the ones I mentioned above. You can add-edit-remove any stream you want. A stream can be a home feed, replies, DM, pending (scheduled tweets) stream of any of your own Twitter account. Streams can also be a Twitter search result, or a Twitter list. The interesting thing you can do is create a new tab entirely focused on all the DMs of all your Twitter account for example. Or one with various search results. Tabs are groups, and streams are the components of this group.
In the end, what you find on the phone is a reduced version of the Hootsuite’s Web app. The app is 75% stable, it often won’t show lists of following/followers, it will often display a force close message, it will sometimes take minutes before sending a message, the loading time is a bit slow… In other words, Hootsuite is not the best app to
tweet on the go, but it’s definitely the only and best app to manage all of your Twitter accounts on the go! For those of us who are used to tweet while waiting for the bus, Hootsuite is the best complement to your mobile microblogging.
I found a few features missing: Couldn’t find how to retweet as another user, couldn’t connect to my Facebook pages, couldn’t add a RSS feed to a user’s activity. There is a built-in Web browser that’s kind of fast, but it’s too simple to compete with your regular Web browser, and it doesn’t have enough tweeting integrated features. Also, Hootsuite’s most likely biggest issue is the screen’s real estate: Very often, not all of your Twitter accounts will be suggested for use because they can’t all fit in.