HootSuite blog – Social Media Dashboard

At HootSuite, the professional Twitter client, we want to live up to our name, so we’re constantly listening to you and implementing improvements. Our newest update adds exciting new features, including file sharing and auto-complete. 

Picture Uploading

Many of our users have requested this feature, and we’ve obliged. Within HootSuite, you can now upload pictures by pressing the picture icon.

Once you’ve uploaded your image, HootSuite will return an ow.ly URL for you to tweet — making it trackable through our custom analytics. Every picture uploaded is hosted on ow.ly. By logging into ow.ly, you can also administer your galleries. This is yet another way we’ve pushed Twitter to amazing new heights.

File Uploading

Now you can share files on Twitter. HootSuite is the first major Twitter client to support this exciting feature. Similar to picture uploading, you must instead click the document icon. HootSuite supports many document formats: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Photoshop, and MP3 files. As with pictures, links to files are trackable with HootSuite’s custom analytics.

Intelligent Auto-Complete

Ever forgotten someone’s Twitter username? HootSuite’s new auto-complete feature helps you overcome this problem. Once you type a name, HootSuite remembers it. With your next reply, HootSuite automatically generates a list of the names you most frequently engage with. You can also remove someone from auto-complete by pressing the “x” button beside their name.

What will HootSuite do next? We’ve got lots of goodness planned, but we welcome all feature requests. What features would you like to see added to HootSuite in our next update?

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HootSuite can schedule your tweets -- and make life easier

Few of us have the time to be on Twitter all the time. In this post, we explain how to make the most of a well-known HootSuite feature: scheduled tweets.

Improving visibility
If you send more tweets, your Twitter handle and your content become more more visible. Scheduling your content to come out at regular intervals during the day translates to improved visibility, and has the additional benefit of being less interruptive. Many business and power users have told us that scheduling content in advance allows them to focus on other Twitter experiences such as retweeting, sourcing new content streams or having conversations.

Sending time-sensitive tweets
Some tweets need to go out at specific times: announcements, promotions, and customer service responses. This is especially true when your target audience lives in a different time zone than you. In Los Angeles, if you’re starting your workday, someone in London is finishing theirs. With scheduled tweets, you’re able to ensure your followers are reached at the appropriate time.

Controlling content flow
Nobody likes to be inundated with a torrent of tweets. Many Twitter users have a lot to say but do not want to come across as spammy. Instead of sending 20 tweets in the span of 5 minutes, why not send 20 tweets over the course of 10 hours? By staggering your tweets, your messages reach the world in a more cohesive, less obtrusive manner.

Optimizing for traffic
If you know that your links are more likely to be clicked at a particular time, HootSuite lets you schedule accordingly, to maximize the penetration of your content. Public relations people or media workers familiar with Jack Shafer’s news cycle theory will see the benefit of this feature immediately.

These are all good reason to schedule your tweets. But everyone has their own reason for using this HootSuite feature. What is yours?

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