If you are serious about social networking and social media then you are probably using HootSuite already. If you are not, HootSuite is our application of choice for our various writers and to house our myriad of client accounts.
HootSuite has been free for the last two years and we have enjoyed and really used the service. In fact is wasn’t until Facebook chopped Fan Page posting by third parties that we really found out just how much we depend on the application to manage our growing social media enterprise.
In the next seven days if you use HootSuite, you will be forced to choose either the free restricted use option or will have to move to the Pro paid option that is based on a pricey fee structure for team members. You get yourself free and four more team members for $15 each. Add another member and it is $30 per member up to a cap. Ouch that can get expensive for certain businesses ours included.
Social media is here to stay and our service offerings and number of clients is steadily growing with HootSuite, even the paid Pro version we can quickly and effectively do the work we need to do. I consider HootSuite and integral part of our service offerings.
Please note HootSuite will pay me a small commission if you sign up for a Pro account, but that is not my reason for writing this post.
If you can’t justify $15/month per Hootsuite team member, you should check out GroupTweet.com. It obviously doesn’t offer all the features of Hootsuite, but GroupTweet will enable an UNLIMITED number of team members to contribute content to a single Twitter timeline for only $5/month. You will likely need to sign up for the premium account because you won’t want all of your followers to be able to publish DM’s to your Twitter timeline. The Premium account will give you features such as Author Whitelisting or Message Moderation. You can tweak the settings so it displays messages coming from different team members or just as if there was only one person managing the account.
Lastly, you can use GroupTweet in conjunction with any Twitter client out there, ie Tweetdeck, Twitter.com or even Hootsuite’s free version…
Let me know if you have any questions, see http://www.grouptweet.com/about or email me at ryan@grouptweet.com.
You should give Media Funnel a try. It’s primary audiance is enterprise level social media users where MediaFunnel offers huge discounts compared to hoot suite, but they also have a solid free plan that works perfectly for me. http://www.mediafunnel.com