3 days of Hootsuite: The interface

I was a skeptic.

Scrolling through endless amounts of cat gifs on Reddit.com was something that I did while multitasking house chores, or even talking on the phone. Essentially, I was already trying to do many things all at once. So when I first heard about software sites like Hootsuite, I immediately was intrigued. The ultimate goal for these sites was to have access to all social media information at once. In essence, trying it out was multitasking while multitasking — checking my tweets, while watching Youtube videos, while washing the dishes.

On day 1

I decided to try out Twitters Tweetdeck because it was free and I thought it would help me manage my assignments for my EID100_RU modules online. I had mistakenly miss-spelled the classes twitter handle, and was late in submitting my midterm questions. At first glance, it allowed me to tewwt, reply, post, and see messages on one stream. I actually enjoyed it a lot! I’m a visual person, so to see things in this order really changed my view on the interface.

I wondered, how could this help me with things that I like? This was when I decided to switch to Hootsuite and check it out.

Day 2: Hootsuite

I signed up for the free 30 day trial for Hootsuite, and was deciding to immediately cancel the subscription after the assignment was done. I was immediately confused by all of the boxes buttons, that I almost gave up.

But after adding my accounts, I saw how it had the potential to help me connect better with artists. I linked my art page on Instagram, and twitter profile to get a glimpse of all the information. After a few minutes of playing around, I started to get used to the interface.

Day 3: Hootsuite

On my third day of using the single point site, I’ve come up with a few likes and dislikes about the site. The first con, was that I wasn’t a very engaged Instagram user. The analytics tab did not show me anything useful since I didn’t have much engagement on the app in the first place. I also was very confused about “buying reports”. According to the free version, you can get up to two free reports, and with the Pro plan, you receive a few points to use per month.

I also found that it was a little hard to stay on topic with the assignment. The goal of Hootsuite was to have a single point of access to follow experts in the field, and have their work shown on the interface. On the site it seemed as if the streams showed content that was mine. It was hard to explore other experts online.

I’ve decided to use Hootsuite up to the 30 day trial instead of deleting it right away. Although social media site are notoriously easy to navigate, I think it’s going to take me a little bit longer to figure the site to the fullest!