Software Review: Hootsuite

I've begun using Hootsuite to manage many of my posts to social media sites.  For those who don't know, Hootsuite is a web site that lets you aggregate your social media accounts into one place and then manage your posts to them.  It handles Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare, WordPress, MySpace, PingFm, and mixi.  It does not handle Blogger, Goodreads, Scribd, and a few other places I post content.  You can install an app so that you can integrate Digg, but Delicious, Pinterest, and Google + are missing completely.

Despite these limits, the site is good because it lets me manage Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  I started posting to LinkedIn about a week or so ago and people I know there have been responding to the posts.  Who knew that would work?

One nice feature of Hootsuite is I can schedule a post.  I've not used this feature but I assume it works.

I am using the free version.  If you want to pay money, you can get reports that analyze your effectiveness.  Frankly, I don't know that I need that.  I only started using Hootsuite to be more efficient with my time.  Now that I know I have a series of novels in my future, I wanted to be as efficient as I can be getting the word out.  If one post on Hootsuite covers the majority of the sites I need to cover, then that's a win. So is the Hootsuite app for my phone. It let me send updates as they occur to me or as my schedule permits.

And for the sake of completeness, let me also note that there are other applications that do much the same thing as Hootsuite.  Socialoomph is one.  TweetDeck is another.  I prefer Hootsuite because it seems more complete.  All it needs is connections to more sites.