Oh, how I love Hootsuite. It makes our lives so much easier – the messages across all of our social networks, the scheduling of tweets, all of our mentions and private messages and the lists we like at a glance in separate columns… Hootsuite is indeed a great thing, and bonus that it was borne right here in our fine city of Vancouver.
The other great thing about Hootsuite is it allows us to Tweet across several Twitter accounts. But is this always a good thing?
Over the last year or so I’ve seen duplicate messages simultaneously going out from personal Twitter accounts and business accounts. I get that perhaps a CEO doesn’t mind sharing his/her personal news to followers of his/her company as well. As they say, you want to show that your business is run by a person, right? I can also understand a company with several departments (@VancouverSun or @GeorgiaStraight, for example) with different followers on these accounts who may all want to hear the news. Sometimes those 5 tweets at a time get annoying, but I understand.
But I’ve seen some really bad tweets out there… whether followers recognize it or not, I’ve seen very obvious personal tweets going out on company accounts… or individuals who perhaps didn’t want to reveal that they were tweeting for the company they work for (Interns? Hello, I see you!). I tried to find an example right now, but no one’s tweeting for business at night…
So while Hootsuite (or Tweetdeck, or other similar socmed tool) is a great timesaver tool and makes business and personal life much easier on social media, if you’re not careful with those thumbs and mouse-clicks, your double tweet might cost you.
After trying out the auto tweet-on-Facebook feature (I rarely like to use @ references on Facebook), and the Facebook post-on-Twitter features, my personal preference is still to think about the message, and whether or not it’s appropriate for each network. And I’ve done my share of tweets that weren’t meant to go out, but always try and rectify them by deleting right away.
Have you ever been burned by a Hootsuite mishap?
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