With taking several weeks off at the end of 2011 I decided to sign up for HootSuite Pro to help manage some Tweets. If anything I thought I’d be able to have greater control over scheduling Tweets to multiple accounts compared to what is already offered via the Basic Free Version of HootSuite.
Comparing HootSuite Pro vs HootSuite Basic shows that the Pro version is more focused on analytics. Reviewing your stats is great, so it’s a welcomed addition but it’s the same information you can pull elsewhere.
Another feature available to Pro accounts is the Bulk Message Scheduling feature.
While the Bulk Message Scheduling feature sounds great there are a few quirks with how to get it working.
In order to bulk schedule you will need a spreadsheet with the following columns:
Date (dd/mm/yyyy format)
Time (hh:mm format)
Tweet
You can upload only one spreadsheet to each social profile and you cannot repeat the Tweet even if you allow for a 24 hour time period in between. If you try to schedule the same Tweet 3 days apart you will get an error message when uploading your spreadsheet to HootSuite. Also if you do end up uploading a spreadsheet for multiple accounts your calendar will be overrun with duplicate Tweets. As in if you scheduled Tweet A for profiles X, Y and Z in your calendar you will have 3 separate entries. This is the complete opposite of how you can manually schedule a Tweet via the HootSuite dashboard in that you can link Tweet A to profiles X, Y and Z which will show in your calendar as 1 entry going to several profiles.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on HootSuite but I was expecting a better solution to bulk scheduling. I was hoping for drag drop date editing, quick copy/paste tweets for mass scheduling or even just being able to schedule a tweet to multiple accounts. Maybe HootSuite Enterprise offers a better solution.
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