HootSuite vs TweetDeck: Twitter clients face-off

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Tweetdeck may be the one that has just sold to Twitter for $40 million
– but there are a couple of reasons why you should consider rival HootSuite. And not just to be different.

Key advantages of using HootSuite for Twitter

Built-in .owly link shortener which provides in-app click analytics
Useful for: tracking the success of content and real-time analytics.
Compared to Tweetdeck: sure you can include link-shorteners on Tweetdeck, but the analytics is less immediate.

Team Collaboration – access for multiple people to the same account
Useful for: when you have a handful of people contributing to one account
Tweetdeck: of course if you give everyone the same log-in you can do this on Tweetdeck, HootSuite just gives you a bit more control over multi-person accounts.

Access to different social media accounts: Facebook, Linked-In etc
Useful for: Those multiplatform accounts, when you want to get content out across different platforms quickly.
Tweetdeck: does this too, but one upside with HootSuite is that your .owly account will measure clicks across all platforms and aggregrate useful info from all over, good if you need to present a report about the reach of your content to clients.

Support for many accounts
Useful for: managing 5+ Twitter accounts – probably if you’re in social media for work, rather than just pleasure. Downside – you have to pay for this.
Tweetdeck: Tweetdeck is good at this too.

Scheduled Updates
Useful for: lots of reasons, but especially if you want to optimise content because there are certain times of the day when content does better than others.
Tweetdeck – not yet available.

Conclusion
– if you’re a social media professional then this is a handy way of managing multiple accounts and the easy-access social analytics is a real asset. We also love the scheduled tweets functionality.
If you have cash to spend on Twitter, then the HootSuite professional package is really useful.

More on HootSuite Features

[thanks @tammielovesyou for the HootSuite pep talk]

Anna Leach

3 comments

  • Hi,
    Nice article. Hootsuite is a better option but for me my personal favourite is Blog2Social. It is one the best social media cross posting plugin and is user friendly. The main thing is that there is no corn job to be done. There is no server side installation process to be done. It is simply activation and installing.

  • Interesting – an error in the article: Tweetdeck does scheduled updates. I use them all the time.

    As for my choice – I use Tweetdeck for the exact same reason as Mark uses Hootsuite LOL – because I get to download something that runs on my desktop RATHER then having something run in a browser – but you can do that in tweetdeck too if you like.

  • The reason I moved to Hootsuite is that you use it in a browser, rather than having to download a program to your desktop. Hootsuite is easier if you use home and work PC for Twitter.

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