Tweetlater is now called SocialOomph!

This is a brilliant tool created to save time, increase productivity, and definitely ease the ability to market and drive traffic to your website(s). I’ve been using this for most of the year along with a variety of others to assist in the management and development of my own, and client Twitter profiles. This ensures we are better able to focus on our business. As a social media educator, tools aside, myself and clients must still take a few moments each day to login and ensure we’re engaging in conversations and @replies.

The Busy-ness of Business

No sane business person has the time to spend the number of hours necessary in the early stages of establishing a Twitter profile to increase their Follow list; their business can’t afford the distraction! As such, many of my clients and business peers (not industry) were initially hesitant to jump into using Twitter. In their eyes, Facebook was enough of a drain on their time, not to mention other social sites that come highly recommended for their industry.

In Comes SocialOomph

The sweet-spot of SocialOomph is with the User Interface (UI) that offers a variety of account management features and views for managing the volume of twitter traffic and tweets. Managing client Twitter Accounts, for example, whether monitoring, tweaking, or re-strategizing, SocialOomph becomes very useful with streamlined means to navigate profiles without constantly logging in and out of Twitter.

Advantages

Read their home page and you will see a host of benefits they talk about. Listed below is my own list of useful pieces of the puzzle, and my personal recommendation with it. 

• Schedule tweets — Plan, set & forget!
• Track keywords on Twitter — Empower yourself!
• Save and reuse drafts — Save hours of typing!
• Bit.ly URL shortening — Track those clicks!
• Follow those who follow you — Automate!
• Unfollow those who unfollow you — Automate!
• View @Mentions & Retweets — Multi-account efficiency!
• Purge your DM Inbox — Keep it tidy!
• Personal status feed — Your own tweet engine!
• Unlimited Twitter accounts — No charge!
• Manage all your Twitter accounts — One integrated console!
• Integrate all timelines & keywords — Boost your productivity!
• Filter your timelines — Tune in only on favorite friends!
• Do the same action on multiple accounts — One click, save time!
• Mute annoying tweeters — Avoid frustrations!
• Hide read tweets — Unclutter your view!
• Delegate your Twitter account management — Free up time!
• Schedule recurring tweets — Without them being repetitive!
• Pause & unpause recurring tweets — Fine-tune campaigns!
• Bulk upload & schedule tweets — Save time!
• Get all new enhancements — No extra charge!
• NEW!! Monitor Channels – System default channels & Your Own Custom Channels!

Disadvantages

That’s quite a list of advantages, and it is necessary to speak to what I perceive as disadvantages. First, It is important to recognize that software services evolve as the demand for certain features increase, and SocialOomph continues to evolve, bringing new enhancements, features, and controls; something that is necessary to combat some of the negative aspects of Twitter Users inappropriate Tweet-Behavior.

Recurring Tweets: A great idea with a pitfall if relied upon too heavily. It becomes apparent to your audience when you rely too much upon this feature and can cost you followers who “give up” on following a non-person entity. This is not to say there isn’t the right time and place for the feature.

Follow / Unfollow: This simple drawback has a management feature that offers some protection. The issue with it is the limits placed upon API requests by Twitter. Were abusers to follow / unfollow repeatedly, their actions affect the number of interactions that become successful for building your list. That said, my observations suggest SocialOomph has some controls implemented to attempt to counter this, though the systematic tools have limitations over the creativity of the human animal’s unpredictability. Overall, a minor disadvantage.

Recurring Tweet Management: As a power-user of systems, databases, spreadsheets, the one-by-one management of scheduled tweets, retweeting them, recycling for scheduled tweets, can be a tad tedious. Rather than get bogged down online, the counter-recommendation is to begin the practice of offline tweet management and using their Bulk Upload feature.

Deleting / Cleaning Up Tweets: Reviewing history, or adjusting scheduled tweets, multi-select and taking action upon them in bulk is not an option. It’s a one-by-one process, and if deleting, editing, etc., this can be tedious. Recommendation: Get it right the first time.

OVERALL RECOMMENDATION

This is a great tool, and I highly recommend its use for managing your Twitter Account(s) and your client’s Twitter Accounts(s). With the affordable monthly cost, I definitely suggest the Pro Account for Increased Productivity while improving your Time Management significantly.

As a Pro Account user, all upgrades and additional features are available for life.; another serious benefit.

This brilliant tool, which I’ve been using for a couple of months, has made a tremendous difference in my time saved with Twitter management. For one thing, I work with a variety of others to assist in the management and development of their Twitter profile while they continue to focus on their business. They do the normal chatting things, I take care of the other stuff.

The Other Stuff

No sane business person is going to spend the number of hours necessary in the early stages of establishing a Twitter profile to increase their Follow list; their business can’t afford the distraction! As such, many of my clients and business peers (not industry) were hesitant to jump into Twitter. In their eyes, Facebook was enough of a drain on their time.

In Comes Tweetlater

Tweetlater is another tool that came into my sphere some time ago, and has no direct connection to other automated pieces of the puzzle. It’s sweetness comes in the UI and the opportunities it presents. Helping others manage their accounts, and managing my own accounts (for more than one site and industry), whether it simply be monitoring, tweaking, or re-strategizing, it becomes very useful having streamlined means to navigate all these profiles without constantly logging in and out.

Advantages

Read their home page and you will see a host of benefits they talk about. Listed below is my own list of useful pieces of the puzzle, and my personal recommendation with it. If I omit anything from their own list of benefits here, it still remains for you to discover as I did not find significant value in my sphere yet. We rarely use all the drillbits in our power drill, we use the drillbits for the kind of jobs we do most often.

• Automatically sends Welcome DM (direct message) to new followers
  (our recommendation: Don’t, it bugs a lot of people)
• Autofollows those who Follow you. (
  our recommendation: DO, they’re interested, build your list, you’ll be able to leverage their audience too)
• Auto-Unfollow ensures Tweetlater drops the shifty people who like to Follow to get you following them, and then Unfollows thinking they’re 1) making their life easier with their data stream, or 2) enhancing themselves as more of an expert by articially influencing their Follow list without showing any reciprocity. This is dependent on other factors.
  our recommendation: DO, you’ll be glad you did. Once you reach a certain level, this becomes less a factor, however when building a list this is key to keeping it consistently growing
• Optional @Replies Digest Email helps you review the responses people sent to you each day in case you didn’t get logged in.
  our recommendation: DO, as a busy professional, you will find this saves you tons of time and allows you to laser target your responses as necessary. This will minimize the time and effort with social media conversations.
• Manage Many Accounts with TweetCOCKPIT is available for the Pro-Version. You can still manage multiple accounts free of charge, however, the TweetCOCKPIT view enables me to monitor and action all accounts from one page. BIG SAVER!
  our recommendation: DO, when you are promoting more than one website. Websites are keyword and destiny specific most often. There is more background to this advantage than I can explain here.
• Delegating Twitter Account Management ensures that I can also extend access to other Tweetlater professionals. They access only the account I give them access to, so as a team (as designed personally) you leverage each others time and talent.
  our recommendation: DO, if you have a team or staff, this will get more active participation going across the Twitter accounts of these staff and the company stream. A big piece of this is strategy and set-up, and offers more uses than I’m sharing for the sake of brevity.

Disadvantages

As a subscriber to this service, I find myself in the uncommon position of wanting to share a disadvantage or two about this tool. As I began, I started with the Free before moving up to the Pro version and watched it benefit me overall. Once at the Pro version, I immediately began taking advantage of more of the features.

• Recurring Tweets:  One feature in particular that I liked about the Pro-version is the Recurring Tweets. This is a brilliant idea. We know what self-promotional bits and links we want to share through the course of the week, so why not pre-schedule them? This just allows you, as a business person, to manage your time commitments and keep working on your business. But there is an apparent disadvantage.

  As Twitter matures, more features, tools, and applications pop up that other Twitter accountholders use. Whether it is a Twitter client such as TweetDeck, or a browser plugin, I’ve noticed that the Twitter streams are revealing more detail about the Tweet, rather than just the content provided.

  Why I feel it is a disadvantage
  
  When I began using it, and had the other automated tools working, one of these  other tools emailed me a Unfollow report everyday. In it I would see who unfollowed, and what Tweet came out right about the time they unfollowed. Observing this over the period of a couple weeks (I like to be sure), I found that people consistently unfollowed the Tweetlater recurring tweets.

  our recommendation: DON’T, unless your systems, purpose, vision, and audience are the type that will support what you’re doing.
  

• Account Management Interface

  This isn’t an uncommon complaint of mine, it’s just that Tweetlater also needs to know about it, consider it, and hopefully make some improvements.

  Managing data is a task, and not always a fun task. As users of systems and interfaces, we want to see and experience solutions that streamline and improve our experience. One very important aspect is saving time. As with most online software services, this seems lacking.

  With rows of accounts, tweets scheduled, etc., I prefer the concept (not a proposed solution, only making the point) of how spreadsheets work (databases too). If I need to delete a bunch of records, Select All, Delete. In Tweetlaters case, as an example, I’m stuck Deleting one tweet at a time. This is painstakingly tedious when when I’m cleaning things up.

OVERALL

I like it, use it, and don’t think about it much anymore. It has become my friend and I’m comfortable suggesting you try out the free version, and then upgrading to the Pro to take advantage of its other features.

By the way, being a Pro user, all upgrades and additional features are available to us.

With online user applications, the simple streamlined interface is a sought after commodity. People are more likely to use something that is easy to learn, and is useful or entertaining in their lives. For the most part, as we’ve developed web technology, the aim has been to simplify significantly for the easiest user experience. As web technology and services advance, however, so do the users and levels of users.

Is it an App or a Website?

As with most things, the UI is usually designed more like a website page than an app. When I think of apps, I think of efficient tools. I’m seeing  a lot of good things everywhere of course, but this one simple concept of managing database information quickly and efficiently gets swept into an idea born from the visual expectation of a web page. In other words, I’m saying give the ability to update records in bulk versus one at a time when creating these external toolsets. It’s the backend processing that would simply need adjusting to auto-schedule bulk updates into a stream, versus the abusive look of 20 tweets popping into a stream in the same minute.

What about abuse?

Feedback loops already in place help to weed out abusers and in social media, we need to self-police. That means we all are participating in this role of reporting the abusers. As with anything, there is a certain level of self-promotion that is a significant and important element of social media. We all want to be seen, heard, and to be known by others. In turn, we do the same as we are curious too of others.

Are there savings to be realized?

I can imagine, that were I presented with the full page of data as most apps currently serve the information, were I able to update each of the 10 to 20 records presented all at once before pressing the Submit, Send, or Save button, that there would be savings enjoyed.

Each button pressed on a web page sends information across the web. Each request returns new fresh results that are then updated on the web page. Pressing that button once to update the information presented, versus the 10 to 20 as I update each individually, and I would think that the load on the Internet Traffic would be reduced somewhat, as would the load on the server processing the requests.

I know without a doubt, that as the user experiencing this shift in updating information presented, that the savings in time would allow me to accomplish more, to engage more, and to create more.