What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is an app you can use to organize your entire social media life.
Who is it for?
It's for anyone who wants to improve their social media footprint.
It's for someone who has a fairly strong social media presence, but needs a better way of organizing it all.
Last, it's for companies and media organizations who need an efficient way of organizing their social media presence.
What makes HootSuite stand out?
It's highly flexible, allows you to connect multiple social media sites, and even allows you to connect across as many accounts as possible on the same social media site. For example, if you have a personal Twitter account and a company Twitter account, you can tweet from both of those accounts at the same time.
If you're a company or organization with multiple people managing social media accounts, HootSuite allows you to anchor everything in one place. If there are interns who tweet, they can create drafts that higher-ups can approve before they're sent out.
Scheduling tweets has never been easier with HootSuite too.
My real-life experience with HootSuite
I've used TweetDeck for awhile now to organize my social media presence, but I wanted to try something different. I signed up for an account on HootSuite and, right away, I noticed the difference. HootSuite allows for a more engaged and in-depth level of organization than TweetDeck.
The first time I really dived into HootSuite was in a very vital journalistic situation. I was the only USC journalist inside Hillary Clinton's Luskin Lecture at UCLA's Royce Hall. She received a UCLA medal, the highest honor the university gives out. She's also the top Democratic presidential candidate for 2016 and might very well be the first female president of the United States.
So, yes, a very big and important journalism opportunity.
I was covering the event for all three media labs-- Annenberg TV News, Annenberg Radio News and Neon Tommy.
Since I was the only person inside Royce Hall, I had to live-tweet the lecture for all three media outlets.
It's safe to say that the HootSuite mobile app allowed me to do all this and more.
It's an easy app to learn and navigate. My coverage was time-sensitive so I was grateful for that.
At first, I emailed the editors-in-chief of the three outlets to see if they could get their social media people to tweet an announcement about me covering the event. (Like any savvy social media guru, I knew that this was important so people not only knew where to go for updates, but to gain more followers!)
I connected ATVN and Neon Tommy's accounts (as well as my personal accounts) to my HootSuite account (I don't have access to the Annenberg Radio News account). Instead of waiting to hear back, I was able to tweet from those two accounts something along the lines of "Follow @AnnaMSterling for livetweets of the Hillary Clinton #LuskinLecture." From then on, I tweeted from my personal account.
The HootSuite mobile app made my life infinitely easier for this task, and for that, I highly recommend it. The TweetDeck mobile app has been giving me issues in terms of connecting my Facebook and Twitter accounts, so this was a much-needed relief.
The one thing I will say negatively about HootSuite is that I couldn't find a desktop app version to download. The TweetDeck desktop app is still my go-to when using Twitter on my computer for that reason.
The only way to use HootSuite on your computer is to go to the site. The interface is easy to navigate, but it doesn't look amazing. In fact, it's in big need of a facelift.