TECHNOLOGY hootsuite.com reviewed

A site in my sights
http://hootsuite.com

What is it?
Hootsuite is a web application and iPhone app that makes it easy to manage multiple social networking accounts from a single interface.

What’s it like to use?
Not bad at all. Occasional service outages aside, and ignoring intermittent issues with the URL shortener and the Bookmarklet, Hootsuite is simple, practical, easy to understand and very flexible.

Benefits
Hootsuite allows multiple users to easily manage multiple social networking accounts. It has the added benefit of a basic (if inconsistent) analytics package for your short URLs. It copes well with Twitter lists and Facebook pages and can save Tweets and send them later at a prescheduled time. It's perfect for corporate social networking – for example nine of us use it in The Mayo News for our five (so far) Twitter accounts and Facebook page. It can also be used for LinkedIn, Ping.fm and Wordpress. For those nasty corporations who want to prevent their staff from accessing Twitter and Facebook, Hootsuite allows monitoring and updating without accessing the actual websites, enabling the (short-sighted) blocking of the sites themselves (boo!).

Is it any good?
Yes, with the caveats above, Hootsuite is great. Its integration is extremely convenient and the iPhone app is extremely handy. Recommended. FK