Why I hate HootSuite.

I got into a discussion with our social media expert the other day about HootSuite.

I had asked him if I could post something to twitter, and he responded with our login info for HootSuite instead. Its better, he suggested, because you can monitor any number of streams, schedule posts etc. I told him I wasn't fond of it, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

I use twitter all the time. Sometimes I'm venting, sometimes I'm looking for suggestions, recommendations for business, or just want to hear other people's opinions on a given subject. What I like about twitter is that there is a connection. A conversation.

And I appreciate the tag that it adds about the client used. When someone is posting from an iPhone, I see twitter for iPhone, echophone, twitter for Blackberry, etc. It reinforces the idea that these are coming from real people.

When things go wrong, and people tweet five things in a one-minute timeframe, I often see HootSuite as the client. So when people's tweets are tagged using HootSuite, I assume that they are being cranked out by a social media consultant, or worse, by some kind of automated script. Its no longer a conversation, its a bullhorn. Its spam.

So when I see HootSuite, I assume you have so much to say that you need to automate your dispatches, and its probably not that important to me.