HootSuite, my favorite Social Media dashboard by far, is actually a greedy shark like all the others. Starting to become less and less cool not very long ago, now blew it up altogether. I’m going to explain myself very shortly. They have been launched in Canada, and when he was commissioned by Buffer, Guy Kawasaki had very few words to say about their main rival: Don’t use HootSuite, Buffer is better. Actually he said something like this in “What the Plus” a book he wrote in order to promote Google Plus.
HootSuite Logo
[source: http://pillarsocialmedia.com]
HootSuite – Short Approximate History in Greediness
HootSuite started as a Twitter posting platform. It was nice, you could watch simultaneously your Twitter stream, your published posts, your mentions, your scheduled posts, your DMs… They added Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus for pages and even Instagram. You could use up to five Social Media accounts and manually schedule a lot of posts. Sometimes, because of the infamous Twitter’s whale (the moment when Twitter’s server was too stressed and instead of your status, a whale picture appeared), one or two scheduled posts failed to be published. It wasn’t a problem because you could always repeat the operation. Five accounts were cool. Even the paid option wasn’t bad at about $6 per month and even less if you paid annually. They reached the peak of my admiration when they added the scheduling to Google Plus personal accounts, a premiere at the time.
What’s happening now? Now they reduced the account numbers to three, and a paid option with 10 social accounts is $19 per month. Of course they say that the number of scheduled posts is unlimited, but you have to know that nothing is “unlimited”, and it is really hard and quite unwise to reach the limit. The reason I wrote this article in the first place, is that not only it’s difficult to manage just with three social profiles on a HootSuite account, but they have restricted the scheduled posts number to a maximum of thirty! Until now, I used it for a Twitter, a Facebook and a Google Plus page with twelve posts per day per account, which is not much, not spammy, not time consuming. Their limit doesn’t cover me even a whole day of Social Media posting, and that upsets me more that I can express here. I’m not a paid Social Media manager and I have enough content to promote myself, so this new scarcity is quite annoying. I do not have time to waste. Now I need to adapt the number of my daily posts according to these new conditions. It’s a shame, really.
Alternatives
I know less scheduling alternatives for free, and the paying ones are really not easily affordable for “normal” users. Buffer is the best with a paying subscription they call “awesome plan”, allowing up to ten social accounts with 100 posts to schedule per account, for $10 per month. It works very smoothly, and you can do it in minutes. The free option allows only three accounts with a total of TEN scheduled posts at a time. Not cool at all.
Also 10 social accounts with unlimited scheduled posts and a $15 per month, are offered by contentstudio.io. The free option allows two social accounts with a total of maximum 500 scheduled posts per month between them. I first heard of them on Quora. Also on Quora I found another scheduler with just a $7 per month “Pro” plan, with up to “16 projects”, but I’m not well informed of their features. I don’t even know what are those “projects”, the issues are not very clear at a first view, I only guess that they actually refer to social profiles. The free plan offers only one “project”, whatever that means.
Coming back to Guy Kawasaki
In his “What the Plus”, a book he wrote to promote Google’s Social Media platform, Google Plus, he was extremely favorable and he gave a lot of advice. Most of it he didn’t respect at all, but let’s say that if it was valuable, it didn’t matter. A lot changed since then, Google Plus lost its shine, becoming just an insanely content sharing platform without authoring, without rules or credits, without letting you to make a difference between your friends and the rest of the world. You don’t really know if you’re not talking in the desert, especially when your “friends” you used to help don’t need you anymore.
Check out the following interview, it’ll show you a different Guy Kawasaki. Until this moment, I considered him the most polite evangelist in the world. He now is too big to be polite anymore, he better avoid you than having to be kind, so, he unfollowed everyone on all his Social Media accounts. I haven’t understood the maneuver from the beginning, but after watching what it is below, everything became Cristal clear.
Mr. Kawasaki’s interviewer is Loïc Le Meur, former founder of Seesmic, a HootSuite rival company who eventually lets itself be bought by them. I felt offended by Guy Kawasaki‘s means and mode of thinking. What he freely and honestly admitted in this interview, is not what he advises the normal people in his books. He is much above you, so high above that he even quoted the New York Times globalization puppet, Thomas Friedman, one of the shallowest journalists in the world…
“Although his work is stunningly shallow and narcissistic, Friedman is celebrated as a big thinker.
How does a journalist with a track record of bad predictions and a penchant for superficial analysis – a person paid to reflect about the world yet who seems to lack the capacity for critical self-reflection – end up being treated as an oracle?
The answer is simple: Friedman tells the privileged, and those who aspire to privilege, what they want to hear in a way that makes them feel smart; his trumpeting of US affluence and power are sprinkled with pithy-though-empty anecdotes, padded with glib turns of phrases. ” – Robert Jensen, a truth-out.org reviewer.
I’ve been stunned when I heard Kawasaki saying with a slightly arrogant face: “Ze wor’d iz flat, indeed”.
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