Hootsuite: My favourite Twitter Owl. Here’s why.

How good is the new Hootsuite?!

Since their last upgrade they’ve added:

• A personalised dashboard thanks to their selection of unique themes. Options include the familiar green and blue ‘Classic’, sleek ‘Blue Steel’ – feels a bit like Facebook, or a dark ‘Magnum’ theme (my favourite).
• Hootsuite have Google Analytics “baked in”. I can now overlay tweets with web traffic. That gives me a sense of how my Twitter activity is translating to site visits. I like.
• Geo-location searches. Want to know what people are saying about a subject in your area. Just pop the term in the search box and hit the icon that looks like a cross-hair. Works a treat.
• Drag and drop image uploading. Just drag the image into the message box and it automatically loads with a shortened link.
• Share more on Facebook by including photo thumbnails plus titles, descriptions in wall posts, and view pictures and videos from friends in-stream. Prior to this improvement links sent to Facebook via Hootsuite displayed just the link. No photo, no customisation. Now you get to choose the thumbnail and description before hitting the publish button. Honest to god, it’s gold!
• Share Twitter messages with your network using Twitter’s Retweet tool. This one I don’t like so much as I prefer to add a comments in a retweet. It’s a small price to pay and I understand why they’ve done it. They do allow adding of streams to display retweets to you, by you, and by your followers.
• Display your social streams even faster — using HTML5, HootSuite caches content for immediate recall and less waiting for updates. That just means it’s fast. Time’s money. Money’s time.

Now all I want is a Hoostuite iPad app.