All right, you know about my love affair with software. And you know I love exploring new stuff. You also know I hate online versions of most things. I don’t like Google Docs, don’t like online blogging clients (HOORAY for Windows Live Writer, I says!), and generally don’t like online clients for things like Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s an exception: Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a social networking update dashboard which allows you to update your Twitter, Facebook and other social networking accounts from a single interface. If you’re familiar with Digsby, it’s a similar idea, except in an online format, and doesn’t include a chat client.
Hootsuite lets you update your Twitter account and your Facebook account at the same time with the same message. But its most powerful feature is the ability to update both accounts (or others you’ve added to it) at a future date and time.
As little as five minutes can be used as a buffer, or any time in increments of five minutes. You can also choose a day in advance. For writer buddies, this is useful for tweeting about upcoming book releases and announcements which take place on a specific day. So you can pimp your book release on the release date if you want, and do it on the day you GET the release date. Very cool.
Or, if you know about something happening, you can update your Facebook account status with the information far in advance of knowing it. Very convenient, and this has many business and promotional uses for pro bloggers or web-presences.
The drawbacks include not being able to EDIT the information in a pre-dated tweet or status update. I can’t see any way to delete one once you’ve scheduled it, either. So be careful to make sure the information you’re including for future updates isn’t going to change between when you schedule it and when it actually updates.
Check out Hootsuite and see if it can work for you. I’ve been using it a lot to announce and promote my #FridayFlash pieces. Because of my situation and the limited access to the ‘Net I have right now, Hootsuite works great for me. It lets me update the account(s) I want and I don’t have to be online for more than a few minutes to input a lot of updates for later posting. Very cool.
Hope you had a great weekend!
-JDT-
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