New HootSuite 2.0 Love
I’ve been a HootSuite user for several months now, primarily because it allows me to manage several profiles in one tool. Today they launched the public beta of the new HootSuite 2.0. What’s new and cool?
New view with multiple columns and tabs
Right now I use HootSuite for four accounts and it seemed like I had to scroll endlessly to see my dashboard in the old version. Now it’s all right there with tabs! You can reorder the tabs with a simple drag-and-drop. I can see potential here for more robust searching and monitoring with true dashboards.
The new multi-column view makes checking your dashboards so much easier. By default, HootSuite 2.0 created a tab for each of my four accounts. On each account tab, it defaults to my home feed, mentions, direct messages, pending tweets, and sent tweets. But it’s super easy to add another column with profile, keyword, search, or groups. Plus, you can reorder columns with a simple drag-and-drop, as well as re-size the columns to fit more or fewer on your screen.
Groups
The one reason I sometimes wondered if I should go back to TweetDeck–groups! So I was excited to log in and test the groups function. It works, though I recommend a couple of enhancements to make it easier. Foremost is that you have to manually type user names and add them individually. Ease of use would be greatly enhanced by a drag-and-drop feature here. Or at least present me with a list of the people I follow so I can select from the list.
Other features
- As you’d expect, the columns and tabs auto-refresh.
- There’s still a central posting box that allows you to quickly post a tweet from one or more accounts.
- Favoriting, responding, or retweeting is easy–just float over the tweet and a menu pops up right there.
- Handy search box on every tab.
- Manual refresh button on all tabs.
And I love using tools that bring humor into the tasks:
All in all a great improvement to the tool. I plan on playing with the tabs even more to see what types of dashboards I can create.
