HootSuite Adds More Awesome to Hootlet with AutoSchedule
HootSuite adds more awesome to Hootlet with new features including AutoSchedule – a powerful new link share tool that determines the optimal time to schedule social media messaging. Now you can automatically queue messages throughout the day to maintain a consistent social media presence.
Originally released in 2009, Hootlet takes the URL you’re viewing and pops it into a message, ready to share across Twitter, Facebook and our other favorite social networks. No need to leave the web page!
New Hootlet Features:
- AutoSchedule – Enables smart scheduling to maximize reach and impact of your social messaging
- Custom Content Sharing (Chrome Only) – Select and share specific text and images found on websites via Hootlet
- New Personalized Options – Allows you to enable or disable the AutoSchedule drop-down menu
Hootlet is available as a Chrome Extension or Firefox Add-on. If you already have Hootlet installed, these new features will automatically be updated. Try Hootlet today and streamline your sharing:
Not using Firefox or Chrome? The Hootlet is also available as a Bookmarklet. Open your HootSuite dashboard, select Tools, then drag the “Get the HootSuite Hootlet” icon into your browser toolbar.
Hootlet How-Tos:
Using Hootlet couldn’t be easier! After clicking the Hootlet Icon, the title of the page and a shortened link is added to Hootlet’s Compose Box. Personalize the message then share or schedule for a later time. Quick and convenient!
AutoSchedule
Unsure when to send your post? Let Hootlet decide for you! AutoSchedule determines optimal posting times for you to efficiently queue up scheduled messages. Maximize reach without swamping your followers.
Step 1: After composing your message in Hootlet, select the Schedule Icon. A drop down menu will then appear.
Step 2: Toggle the AutoSchedule switch to On. Messages scheduled with AutoSchedule will appear in Publisher with a Clock Icon next to them.
Note: AutoSchedule messages can be rescheduled the same way as regular messages. After rescheduling, the Clock Icon will disappear confirming your new scheduled time.
HootSuite CEO, Ryan Holmes on AutoSchedule:
“It’s really quite simple – instead of our users manually selecting what time they want to schedule or post their social media messages using our Scheduling feature, they can opt to use our new AutoSchedule technology to optimize and automate the scheduling process. It’s as if we’ve added a little helper owl to our Hootlet. We want our users spending more time finding and sharing content and less time worrying about the best time of day to share it.”
Custom Content Sharing
Need to quickly share a quote or image? Custom Content Sharing can add highlighted text or selected images to Hootlet’s Compose Box with just a few clicks.
Sharing Text: Highlight a portion of text, right-click and select “Share current page via HootSuite Hootlet using selected text”. The text is then pasted into Hootlet’s Compose Box with a shortened link to the website you’re viewing.
Sharing Images: Right-click an image and select “Share image via HootSuite Hootlet.” The image will then be uploaded to Ow.ly. The text “[image]” and the link to the uploaded image will then be pasted into Hootlet’s Compose Box.
New Personalized Options
Access Hootlet’s settings in your browser menu to customize your Hootlet settings. From there, you can enable or disable the AutoSchedule drop-down menu. Be sure to click Save Options after you’re done.
Automate Authentically
Automation is one of the next steps in social media’s evolution. As social media becomes more widely adopted, brands and enterprises will need tools that can scale to their social presence – focusing on the speed and volume of responses as well as effort and cost reduction.
While the thought of robots sending Tweets seems to take the social out of social media, automating more mundane tasks like scheduling makes sense (Just like ATMs make a lot more sense most of the time than bank tellers). But, as HootSuite VP Marketing Ben Watson warns, social media should never lose the human touch.
Give it a try and see how Hootlet can help you simplify your sharing:
Not using Firefox or Chrome? The Hootlet is also available as a Bookmarklet. Open your HootSuite dashboard, select Tools, then drag “Get the HootSuite Hootlet” icon into your browser toolbar.
How does the auto scheduler determine what posting times are more effective.
Great stuff. Long time user – it’s been really nice to see how your team has continued to evolve your product. Keep up the great work!
If I were to make a suggestion… consider including a checkbox to notify the sender via email once a tweet is auto posted (like you offer for a scheduled post).
I agree with David! The new feature is super! An email notification will make it even better.
Second that feedback Jelle about to sign up now anyway the software looks excellent.
I have been using Hootlet since yesterday and can see the tremendous value of this awesome tool for my work. Well done thanks guys.
This is terrific! Some suggestions: allow this functionality to work with ReTweets (“RT” style), as well. Right now, when I choose to schedule a RT, I still have to do it manually :( — love this feature though! Please make it available across the board!
I second this
Agreed!!! I’d love this feature
This is a great feature!!!, it will be better if able to limit the number of sharing per hour for prevent flooding sharing
YES, this is essential, if I can cap the number of messages per day/hour to avoid flooding.
Nice. Who needs Buffer?
Very happy to see this go live. How does the auto-scheduling compare to a solution such as Time.ly by Demandforce?
Unable to select text / right-click to tweet using hootlet in Firefox. Any suggestions?
Also, does the auto schedule algo work for both Twitter and Facebook? – will writing one update be auto scheduled for each social network individually? (ex: 10am for Twitter, 2pm for Facebook)
Yo lo uso hace unos años y es básico para mi trabajo. En cuanto a las notificaciones luego de publicado el tweet por supuesto que las brinda si marcas la opción. Yo sugeriría más redes sociales gratuitas y la posibilidad de insertar una URL dentro de una imagen, de forma que tan solo al darle click a la imagen el usuario llegue al lugar que queramos. Eso se puede hacer en Pinterest por ejemplo. Saludos!
I use it a few years ago and is central to my work. With regard to notices published after tweet of course that if you mark the option provides. I would suggest more free social networking and the ability to insert a URL in an image, so that only the image just click on the user reaches the site you want. This can be done in Pinterest for example. Greetings!
Great tool, congrats! How is autoschedule optimal time calculated? I´ve seen that is different for each profile, nice!
Yay for auto schedule! Just wondering if I can set approximate times of the day for the auto post? For example I have determined that it’s best for me to tweet at 10am and 5pm weekdays only – is there a way I can manage this for auto schedule? Thanks!
Quite exciting news! Just used it and enjoyed how it scheduled different times per social media channel. Awesome!
A great, simple idea. I’ve noticed, though, that the auto-scheduler isn’t grabbing the full URL of the page I’m on – any ideas why?
Excited to try this new feature. I’ve been using Buffer App for the same functionality of auto-scheduling.
Always continuing to innovate. Great stuff team.
I’ll be seeing how the AutoSchedule functionality compares to Buffer and documenting my findings.
But initially, this is looking really good!
Way to pull the rug out from under Buffer :-) This is excellent.
Having auto schedule in the Android app would be sweet!
I agree with you Joao
How do you see the calendar of when the tweets will go out that is shown in the video?
You click on the publisher icon which is the little airplane, third icon down, on the top left of your dashboard.
Awsome tool! Love it!
Thanks Hootsuite
Can you provide any information about how you determine the optimal time to post Auto Scheduled posts?
Love this. Can’t wait to try it. :) this makes social media marketing easier. I will be trying it out so I can see if I want to recommend it to my clients. :)
I use HootSuite to different customers, congrats on the new, very useful!
It looks good, but unlike Chrome extensions from others, it doesn’t work on Mac with a browser full screen.
Just started using this functionality. Great addition!
Now my life is complete!
I’m glad to see the auto-schedule option, but you haven’t explained how Hootsuite determines what times to use to auto-schedule your tweets.
Can you give us more information on this.
At the moment, I still prefer Buffer for this, because at least in Buffer I can set up a tweet schedule once, and it’ll use this schedule forever until I change it. If I can’t see your tweet schedule, or change the times, it’s not very useful to me.
Would love to see some more information on this – I’d love to cancel my buffer subscription if Hootsuite can offer the same functionality.
How do you determine the optimal times for the AutoScheduled tweets?
Brilliant update, team. I’d love to see some more features such as editing the schedule and updating the frequency of posts, but this rocks.
Cool to see Hootsuite provide this feature – it’ll be interesting to see how BufferApp will respond to this.
This is a great tool to be on time on any content, I will try it now
How does the auto scheduler know where my target audience is? My target audience is outside the country I’m tweeting from, in a different timezone…
Great new feature. Now how can you make the scheduling of tweets easier? :)…. the upload via spreadsheet is painful and nothing has changed with the tool for a few years.
Help !
Looks great, however my hootsuite text and icons are really tiny??I tried maximizing and changing the font size but still no luck??
Great stuff! I used to find it tiresome to manually paste in the URL, paste in the article title, compose the tweet text and schedule them. Now I just visit a bunch of pages and hit the bookmarklet to get the majority of the work done, and don’t worry about timing of messages.
Is the timing worked out on a system wide or per user basis? Does it know when my account gets most clicks, or when Twitter users as a whole click most?
It’d be amazing if it did it on a per account basis, and in addition looked at keywords in tweets and figured out which of these work best. For example, we post a lot of tweets with ‘Book review’ or ‘Album review’ at the start – if it learnt that these worked better in late afternoon or early evening, for example, and scheduled them then that would be amazing.
Also, we often want to tweet the same links out more than once a day. Obviously each tweet needs to be different in some way otherwise Twtitter rejects duplicates. Having a different short URL allows them to go through – so it’d be brilliant if we could pick a number in a box to show how many times in the day we’d want the tweet to go out, and it could auto schedule it ensuring that it was spaced out throughout the whole day.
Great, now waiting for the Safari extension.
how does the auto schedule know when is the best time?
Will you add the option to customize the amount of tweets I want to post per day? This would be awesome!
AutoSchedule is a fantastic addition to an already awesome app! Is there anywhere I can read how this specific feature works? i.e. How does it choose the time to post? :)
Why there is not schedule option on the web app?
Hi Nigh7mar3,
Keep an eye out. It’s on our roadmap and we’re working on it.
andy – I thought you could turn the feature on and off? I turned it off for one account (for what I thought was one time) and now do not have the option for auto-schedule anymore :( I love the feature can you help me figure out what I did wrong?
Thanks so much for this. You’ve just made my life a little bit easier. Love it!
Nice new addition!
Any plans for integration into the mobile app with this AutoSchedule feature?
Hi Mark,
Thanks! We have no definite timeline but it is on our radar.
FANTASTIC feature!! One suggestion: allow the user to tweak the rules/preferences of the autoscheduler (post/day frequency, time range of posting, etc). Right now it seems to avoid posting anything before 10:30am for me, which has tended to be a productive time for me in the past.
I second that, tweaking of the auto posts would be a great feature for me.
AWesome! Go HootSuite!
I like the Auto-Scheduler concept – I try to only post to our social network accounts about 3 times a day, however, and my first two “auto-scheduled” posts have been scheduled to go up within 45 minutes of each other.
Perhaps a customized setting where a user can specify a minimum time period between postings?
Hi Tom,
That’s a great idea! Let us know about it on the HootSuite Feedback Channel. Users can then vote up your suggestion.
I second this! i would love to know when the posts are set to go up like I did in buffer….
I would agree with Tom here….some sort of settingd for the autoscheduler- maybe hoosuite is checking total users for times of tweets instead of when our users are more enggaged, maybe 10 minutes apart, 45 minutes apart, from 2-5 pm on saturdays, 11am-3pm on sundays, etc…
Looking forward to giving this a go – but I admit Tom’s comment bothers me. I don’t want my posts to appear only 45 minutes apart. I live in S.Africa and like to spread my posts for different time zones.
Why does the auto schedule set up different times for the same message on Twitter and Facebook?
How does the auto scheduler determine optimal times? Is it based on analytics of my previous posts?
Question: what is the logic behind the Auto-Scheduler? Is there some algorithm you are using to decide when to tweet it out? I’m unclear on how its determining when to schedule tweets.
Great tool! Thx!
Does the autoschedule take into consideration the local time or it’s US based? It definitely needs to cater for that as I post to Greece for my client and do not want the posts to go out on US based optimal times..
How does Hootlet determine the best times to post? I would be interested in knowing more about how that is done.
Great work! Is there a way to adjust the Hootlet Firefox Add-on from adding “Mozilla Firefox” to the end of every tweet?
I can’t begin to tell you how much of a fan I am of HootSuite. Your service has been instrumental in my social media success. Thank you so much for continually making it better for all of us!
Auto-Scheduler is great in theory, but it dumps all of my content into a single day, thereby defeating the purpose of spreading my tweets over a period of time. Further customization will make this a great asset, but for now the programming seems useless.
Great feature. Am a paid HS customer. Was gritting teeth at thinking I might have to pay for Buffer – since everything else we do with HS.
Some specifics though would help…
1) How many posts can you queue? 5, 10, 20?
2) What is a basic expectation of when they would go out? (i.e IFTTT polls ever 15 minutes, etc, Buffer is pretty clear with this, i.e not at night, weekends only, 9-5pm, no more than 5 per day) – some sort of beginning expectation would be helpful.
3) Is this avail via the iPhone bookmarklet? or iPhone app?
It looks amazing, but all the auto scheduled posts appear on the same day… Is there any way to make it schedule over more than just today? I’ll have to stick with buffer until then…
I manage several profiles and the Hootlet window is too small and does not allow the drop down menu to scroll down to the profiles at the bottom of that list!
G R E A T! Love it guys!
Is there a limit to how many posts you can schedule?
This would be the perfect solution if it was not an unfortunate reality that there remains no good way for hootlet to pick up the twitter ID of the sharing blog.
great feature indeed … but it seems I get duplicate entries sometimes, I schedule one post and the auto schedule feature creates two entries at two different publishing time. any idea ?
The autoscheduler is only scheduling my tweets for that day. How do I get it to schedule for a week as it claims it can do?
Guys – love the Autoscheduler. How does the Autoscheduler determine when to send out your tweets? Does it analyze your best times to tweet, based on when most of your users are online?
Does it list somewhere what the autoschedule times ARE for each account? Is it certain times per day? Does it change by account? Would lov emore detailed info….
Woot! Very nice job. Been waiting for this for awhile now.
Awesome! Can’t wait to try it out!
Awesome stuff. As with anything, I’l come up with more thoughts and feedback on it with further use. As of now I love it.
The more I use and get into Hootsuite, the more I love it. Keep it up! :)
Unfortunately you can only autopost to a maximum of 5 social networks at once. Why the restriction?
I just scheduled 3 posts and they appeared to just go in at 30 min intervals from now. Where’s the optimization? Surely tomorrow morning would have been a better time!
This is great. I’d just started using Bufferapp, but love the ability to keep as much as possible in one tool. The only thing is, I wonder what the schedule is? Are the “optimized times” a secret sauce? Is it specific to the user, their followers or just when most people are active?
Great! but can you switch the pop up off once we’ve installed it.
Hi Cocoonfxmedia,
Done and done!
Finally! Well done Hootsuite. We love you guys. This makes it so much easier.
Now I don’t have to use buffer anymore
How does Auto Schedule determine optimal time to post? Is it based on my stream or on the activity on which ever social network in general?
How does your auto-scheduler determine the “best’ time to post?
As a big user of Buffer I was looking forward to this addition. To be clear, I like it, but it does need some tweaking. I let me Buffer run out yesterday so I could use this exclusively. So I went about adding my posts… but seeing that I had 8 posts over 4 channels all going out today has me worried about flooding my channels. Even selecting the day the post was to go out and you could optimize the time would be better (for me). Having no control at all, see a specific day loaded up, and then having to edit the posts doesn’t save me any time.
Some parameters/configurations need to be provided so I can let you optimize what you are good at optimizing while I keep a certain level of control on my flow.
Keep up the great work!
Let us use smart schedule feature with ATOM/RSS feeds importing.
This is fabulous, but the drag and drop doesnt appear to work for IE8. Any ideas
Hi Alison,
Contact our Help Desk for assistance with that.
Thanks.
Good idea. But half the time I get a message that asks me to submit a valid date. Also – why can’t we have auto schedule on the web version of hootsuite app? Now I have to cut and paste tweets into hootsuite if I’m not sending a link from page I’m on….
Thx.
Auto-schedule question- If I’m posting to multiple networks, does it optimize for each individually or should I auto schedule for each network?
For example, found a blog post I want to share, should I auto-schedule for twitter then redo the process for FB then again for Google+ or just do it once? If I do it once are they all pushed at the same time? Which network gets priority?
Is the best Social Network app
I try to search many app for manage my networks.
Now with Hootlet can manage all of them in a few time
How does Hootsuite determine when the “best” time is to auto-schedule the posts?
Hootlet has made my social media activities so much easier! I do hope you will be able to create an official Safari extension for this in the near future.
Is this feature currently only for link sharing? When will it be rolled out to just posting social media updates in general?
Hi Diva,
This is available for general social media updates as well.
Good stuff – just wondering if the auto-schedule feature works on bulk scheduling? If not is this part of hootsuite’s roadmap? Many thanks!
Hi Cathy,
There are no immediate plans for this. If this is a feature you’d like to see, let us know on our Feedback Channel.
How does the AutoScheduling work for multiple posts? I’d love to use it, but I don’t want my posts being sent five minutes apart.
I love the Auto Schedule feature! I have been using it all the time! It definitely makes my job easier!
Great feature! But how does auto-schedule determine the best day/time? What factors are taken into consideration? Does it look at our Followers to determine when they’re online, or when most Twitter traffic takes place, or something else? I cannot find any information on this.
Can you provide more info on how you determine when optimal time to tweet message is? Not sure if I wan tto let you decide when the optimal time is.
Hi. What a wonderful feature, auto-scheduling. Even more, LOVE the “context menu” sharing option to easily tweet text from a page. Priceless! Thank you.
Problem, though. The fact that we haven’t the foggiest when a tweet is scheduled for until checking the schedule *after* scheduling it is troubling. <—-mouthful
Meaning, I already use a couple of advanced free tools to know best times to tweet & blog (http://j.mp/When2Blog ;). But as a long-time marketer who realizes that the tiniest changes can often make some of the biggest differences to results (especially with something as "up in the air" as Twitter timing, generally speaking)… I'm concerned about not being able to sync my "magic" auto-schedule with, let's say, what SocialBro spits out. I know HootSuite is awesome, but my mama (and The Twilight Zone) taught me not to trust the unknown. ;-D
Any thoughts on when/if Hootsuite can "un-secretize" the magic timing so marketers can be more strategic and hands-on about this…?
Loving this new functionality but how many times will auto-schedule tweet each day, bufferapp allows you to set how many tweets to send and then you can see when they will go out, is this possible with Hootsuite?
Hi Everyone,
Thank you for your kind words and insightful questions regarding AutoSchedule. Like all of our tools, we’re always looking to improve on AutoSchedule’s functionality as time goes on. Your suggestions and questions really help us figure out how HootSuite features are being used and ways we can improve them.
AutoSchedule uses a proprietary formula, so we can’t give away our algorithm but I hope to answer a few questions we’ve been receiving:
- AutoSchedule posts for your local time that is set by your computer
- The timing takes into account the different social networks, so different networks will have different times
- There is no frequency control at this time
- There are no timing parameters that can be set (Ex. you cannot customize AutoSchedule to work from 9am – 5pm on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday)
- AutoSchedule currently only works for 5 profiles at a time
- AutoSchedule for mobile is currently not supported but it is on our roadmap
I hope that answers many of your questions. Any additional questions can be directed to @HootSuite_Help or the Help Desk. Our support rangers are best suited to answer any technical questions you might have. Your questions and feedback play a big role in guiding our product development. Thanks for your help!
I am trying Autoschedule for the first time, and it says my message is On, but the message itself is still in my message bar up top, and is not showing up in my scheduled messages in publisher. If I click Send Message, it just opens the scheduling box and confirms that it’s enabled.
How do I check to make sure my message has been saved/scheduled so I can go on to the next one?
Hi Chanel,
If your message was autoscheduled, it will appear in the Publisher view. Contact our Help Desk, if it’s not going through.
Hi Andy
My question is about the algorithm that schedules it.
Does it schedule based on your time zone and then allow a suitable time spread between results, or does it look at your friends/likes/followers and then schedule based on that.
If it does not do this already, it would be really cool (although privacy settings on social websites may prevent this) if it could look all your followers/likes/friends and the times they are most active and then schedule it to hit the most people.
Also, it would be really cool if you could specify the region you want it to hit, international companies may want to target different messages at different time zones.
Steve
Hi Steve,
Currently it’s based on your computer’s time zone. Like many HootSuite features, we’re constantly iterating and improving on it.
Thanks for your suggestion about changing time zones. Suggest it on our Feedback Channel.
No Hootlet for Safari yet?
Love Auto-Schedule but how can I do it with the Bulk load of messages?
Hi Russ,
Great to hear! Currently, you can’t autoschedule bulk uploaded posts.
I’ve finally signed up for Hootsuite, and I’m happy that you guys have built out this feature! Definitely saves me time from having to figure out when my audience would mostly be receptive to my tweets…
It seems the Hootlet is automatically changing all number signs into hashtags #60 becomes a twitter hashtag rather than remaining as a number sign, how can this be turned off?
Hi David,
Go into your browser settings and select preferences for the Hootlet. From there you can toggle “Link Twitter status and user profile handles into the HootSuite dashboard” on or off. Hope that helps.
Started using the auto scheduler today. I love this feature however I just entered a day’s worth of posts and they’re all bunched up in the morning for delivery. How can I tell it to spread 5 posts throughout the day? I’d like to be seen at different times of the day without posting hourly. Any suggestions?
Thanks for coming out with this? I tried bufferapp, but it has it’s limits. Does HootSuite have a limit on the number of tweets?
I am sure there is an easy fix for this, but I have yet to find it. When I use the auto scheduler for Facebook specifically, I want an image from the linked media to show, the way it does when I schedule it directly from Facebook. How can I make this happen?
I’ve scheduled Tweets using Hootlet, but they are not appearing in my scheduler, so I can’t tell if they are going to be sent or not. I’ve cleared my cache and reconnected the Twitter profile. Anyone out there that has resolved this issue? Thanks!
Hi Tyler,
That doesn’t seem right. For assistance with this contact our Help Desk.