HootSuite: Free professional Twitter web client

Twitter's standard web interface has certain drawbacks. Therefore, web clients and desktop applications that make tweeting a truly enjoyable activity have become widespread.

In many cases, web clients are more convenient than their desktop counterparts. They are not so demanding on computer resources, they take care of updating to a new version from the user, offer more useful functions and work in the browser (thanks to which they are often more organically interwoven into the workflow).

In this review, we will look at HootSuite, a free professional Twitter web client designed for active tweeters and business users. This wonderful service also works with Facebook*, LinkedIn, MySpace and Foursquare accounts, with WordPress blogs; connects to Ping.fm , which allows you to update the pages of more than 40 social networks.

HootSuite supports working with multiple Twitter accounts and has an easily customizable multi-column interface.

You can create separate tabs for each account. The tab contains several columns for all tweet streams: Home Feed, Mentions, Direct Messages, Sent Tweets, Favorite Tweets, etc., as well as columns with search queries and Twitter lists. Tabs and columns can be dragged and swapped.

There is a separate convenient People module for managing your followers, those you follow, and lists. Basic information from each person's profile is also listed here.

The Stats section provides detailed statistics on links in tweets (in total and for each link separately), which helps to better understand your audience and intelligently manage the microblog.

Another function of HootSuite that is necessary to promote your sites on Twitter: monitoring the RSS of the site and relaying the titles of new posts on Twitter.

The developers have also implemented a mechanism for automatic deferred publication with date and time assignment. You can find a number of applications for this: congratulations to friends, a personal reminder system, maintaining the life of a microblog even when you are too busy or sleeping, etc.

HootSuite allows you to open access to your account to several people, which is important for groups that jointly run a microblog, a Facebook page*, etc. At the same time, the one who created an account on HootSuite is appointed as an administrator and can control the access of participants to various Twitter accounts and other supported services.

Other interesting features of HootSuite:

• view replay chains, information from Twitter profiles, hashtag search results — without leaving the HootSuite interface;
• publishing a tweet to several Twitter microblogs and other supported services at once;
• the ability to use Google Analytics to maintain statistics on links;
• a bookmarklet for the browser that allows you to quickly post a link to the currently viewed page on Twitter;
• uploading images and files with automatic publication of abbreviated links;
• saving tweets to drafts (you can also store frequently published template messages in this way);
• printing and exporting statistics to CSV files by links;
• visual and audio notifications about updates;
• availability of applications for iPhone (paid version and lite free, with a limit on the number of accounts) and Android (with the same division into paid and free versions).

The disadvantages of HootSuite include an insufficiently elegant interface and the lack of clarity at first glance on how to perform some tweeting tasks. But after a few minutes of acquaintance with this excellent web service, you realize that in front of you is a powerful and very convenient tool for managing Internet activity, allowing you to take full advantage of microblogging.

HootSuite

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