Building My Own Super-Charged Hootsuite and Buffer App Replacement

I’ve been build­ing my own replace­ment for Hootsuite, Buffer App, and oth­er social media mon­i­tor­ing and shar­ing sys­tems. I have only a cou­ple of rel­a­tive­ly minor aspects to fig­ure out, and then I’m cut­ting the cord tying my social media life to stag­nant third-parties like Hootsuite.

Why I (and My Followers) Need Me to Use Such a System

One of the things I do for my fol­low­ers and for the pro­fes­sion­al design, typog­ra­phy, and free­lance and entre­pre­neur com­mu­ni­ties whom I serve is to share links to lots of inter­est­ing or impor­tant arti­cles and resources. That activ­i­ty is some­thing I’m fre­quent­ly told is of great val­ue to mem­bers of the afore­men­tioned communities–my peers, col­leagues, and clients. Consequently, I spend a lot of my time engaged in that activ­i­ty. I also read a great deal of infor­ma­tion for my own edi­fi­ca­tion, and then share from that what I believe oth­ers will value.

Although I read such arti­cles and infor­ma­tion dur­ing the day when I can, I do most of it in the evenings or on the week­ends as I catch up on news on my iPad. Sometimes I even read arti­cles on my phone while wait­ing to begin a meet­ing, stand­ing on line at the bank, or wait­ing for the water to boil. Web browsers and RSS read­ers make it easy for me to access arti­cles and infor­ma­tion from any screen, but nei­ther the var­i­ous browsers nor Hootsuite make it easy to share infor­ma­tion and links from var­i­ous devices. Hootsuite’s mobile apps in par­tic­u­lar are hor­rid, meant pri­mar­i­ly for han­dling replies, not con­tribut­ing to con­ver­sa­tions or shar­ing content.

I need to have a sys­tem that enables easy desk­top, iPad, and mobile access to, and shar­ing of, arti­cles and links. Using a high­ly hacked WordPress-based sys­tem as well as adding key book­marklets into my mobile browsers, I built a sys­tem that allows me to eas­i­ly share links to arti­cles from any device, at a time con­ve­nient for me, and then those links are auto­mat­i­cal­ly shared to my rel­e­vant social media to my fol­low­ers at a time con­ve­nient for them. For exam­ple, if I’m on a red-eye flight and share into my Hootsuite replace­ment sys­tem a link at 3 AM, it does­n’t go out to my social net­works at 3 AM; instead, it’s held until nor­mal busi­ness hours and then shared. Similarly, if I share five links in rapid suc­ces­sion, they aren’t broad­cast in rapid suc­ces­sion but rather spread out dur­ing the busi­ness day so as to avoid time­line flood­ing. Not just that, but I’ve also sought the help of experts from The Marketing Heaven to devise new ways of gain­ing a big­ger audi­ence and expand my boundaries.

My shared links are also clas­si­fied with a sim­ple tax­on­o­my that ensures that they’re only shared to inter­est­ed audiences–for exam­ple: peo­ple who want only typog­ra­phy links and infor­ma­tion from me don’t also have to suf­fer through tweets and updates rel­e­vant to freelancing.

Hootsuite offers less than half of the above described func­tion­al­i­ty, but none of it in con­junc­tion with the word “eas­i­ly.” Buffer App, though eas­i­er to use, offers even less of the above described functionality.

I Pay for Hootsuite...But Hootsuite Long Since Stopped Earning My Money

I’ve been a Hootsuite Pro (paid) user for about 4 years now.

The Hootsuite UI showing a full screen's worth of columns.
The Hootsuite UI show­ing a full screen’s worth of columns.

At first, Hootsuite was a mediocre tool for man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple Twitter accounts. I used alter­na­tives like Seesmic. TweetDeck nev­er had the mul­ti­ple Twitter or oth­er social media account sup­port I need­ed. Then Seesmic gave up and Hootsuite grew into an excel­lent tool for man­ag­ing mul­ti­ple Twitter accounts and Twitter lists–I could sep­a­rate peo­ple whose every Tweet I want to read from those I want to occa­sion­al­ly check in on from news and humor bots.

The abil­i­ty to man­age parts of my Facebook and Google+ pages, and a minor seg­ment of my LinkedIn pres­ence, were plus­es that hint­ed at more func­tion­al­i­ty to come.

Unfortunately for me and thou­sands of oth­er Hootsuite users, that hint­ing was a cou­ple of years ago. Hootsuite nev­er fin­ished the job to turn “parts of” and “minor seg­ment of” func­tion­al­i­ty into “all of” and “full func­tion­al­i­ty of”. Like Seesmic, Hootsuite has grown lax in its devel­op­ment of new fea­tures and pur­suit of deep­er social media inte­gra­tion. So, like Seesmic, I’m drop­ping Hootsuite. This time, though, I’m not hitch­ing my social media work­flow to anoth­er third par­ty who might seem hun­gry and inno­v­a­tive now only to also become fat and com­pla­cent lat­er on.

I’ve actu­al­ly already built–and have been using since the sum­mer of 2013–my own replace­ment for most of Hootsuite’s func­tion­al­i­ty, all of Buffer App’s fea­tures, and quite a few func­tions nei­ther can do. (Note that this sys­tem is not for sale or rent; I’m not sell­ing it. It’s for my use only.)

Feature Replacements Done

So far, my sys­tem replaces (and usu­al­ly improves upon) Hootsuite’s and Buffer App’s abil­i­ties to…

  • Publish to mul­ti­ple social media accounts
  • Schedule and pre-publish social media updates
  • Auto-schedule updates through­out the day
  • Collect, track, and present replies to those updates
  • Give mul­ti­ple users access to all these fea­tures (not that I need that, but the abil­i­ty is there)

Features Unmatched by Hootsuite and Buffer App

I’ve also built into my sys­tem things Hootsuite and Buffer App don’t or can’t do, such as:

  • Auto-scheduling updates and shares days or weeks in advance
  • Controling the exact days and hours through­out which updates (usu­al­ly links to inter­est­ing arti­cles) will be auto-scheduled (e.g. only Monday through Friday between 9 AM and 4 PM or any oth­er hours I select)
  • Complete con­trol over the for­mat­ting of the shared and sched­uled updates
  • Optional auto­mat­ic inclu­sion of hash­tags or keywords
  • Per social net­work for­mat­ting and struc­tur­ing of updates (e.g. include a title, excerpt, and pho­to for Facebook, omit the pho­to for Twitter, send only title and pho­to for Pinterest)
  • Posting live and via sched­ule to a much larg­er selec­tion of social net­works, including: 
    • Google+ per­son­al account
    • Tumbler
    • Pinterest
    • StumbleUpon
    • Diigo book­mark library
    • Reddit
    • App​.net
    • FriendFeed
    • Flickr
    • And more

The Features I Still Haven't Replaced

The fea­tures and func­tions I haven’t yet replaced are, sur­pris­ing­ly, what you might think the eas­i­est to accomplish–those of the front end. My sys­tem does all the mul­ti­ple account post­ing and sched­ul­ing, but I haven’t yet built a front end replace­ment that shows in a sin­gle view columns of social media updates, replies, pri­vate mes­sages, search­es, and oth­er infor­ma­tion. Hootsuite offers such a view, with some mad­den­ing lim­i­ta­tions, which is my major rea­son for build­ing a replace­ment to it. Candidly, I would have devised Hootsuite-centric ways of accom­plish­ing all the oth­er fea­tures I not­ed above if Hootsuite would just fin­ish its front end and give users the func­tion­al­i­ty they’ve been request­ing for years.

Specifically, I’m look­ing into ways to show in a sin­gle brows­er win­dow the fol­low­ing as, depend­ing on the infor­ma­tion, indi­vid­ual columns and uni­fied streams:

  • Different Twitter lists
  • Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook streams
  • Page alerts from Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook (e.g. so-and-so liked or com­ment­ed on page posts or sta­tus­es, in a sin­gle uni­fied stream preferrably)
  • Private mes­sages from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIN (pre­ferrably in a uni­fied conversation-style stream)
  • Replies and men­tions on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Facebook (in a sin­gle uni­fied stream preferrably)
  • Retweet and reshare alerts (in a sin­gle uni­fied stream preferrably)
  • Hashtag, phrase, and key word search­es on Twitter
The Twitter Notifications page unifies into a single stream several data sets.
The Twitter Notifications page uni­fies into a sin­gle stream sev­er­al data sets.

Twitter’s Notifications page shows in a sin­gle list all @-replies, all retweets (user-preferred and Twitter-mandated retweet for­mats), and new fol­low­er alerts. Hootsuite nev­er did get around to imple­ment­ing that. It offers the abil­i­ty to show @-replies in one col­umn and retweets in anoth­er, but it has no mech­a­nism for show­ing new fol­low­ers beyond a week­ly email report and a con­fus­ing “new fol­low­er feed” column.

The approach I’m cur­rent­ly try­ing build­ing that single-window, multiple-column view of the above list­ed social media con­tent is to ded­i­cate a browser–one of the Chromium- or Mozilla-based alter­na­tives such as Comodo Dragon or Comodo Ice Dragon, respectively–to the task. I’m going to try exten­sions to arrange mul­ti­ple tabs as arrayed win­dows or maybe an HTML page with frames or iframes to divide the view into columns of dif­fer­ent URLs such as the mobile views of Twitter Notification’s page, Google+, LinkedIn, social media search­es, and so on. I can’t see this as being an ide­al solu­tion, however.

Obviously not a complete or even functional system, but this is the current approach I'm taking.
Obviously not a com­plete or even func­tion­al sys­tem, but this is the cur­rent approach I’m taking.

What I real­ly want is a Hootsuite-like view of mul­ti­ple columns, but with the func­tion­al­i­ty and con­tent miss­ing from Hootsuite. I’m def­i­nite­ly open to sug­ges­tions on that score if any­one has them.

I’ll update this post as my exper­i­ments and solu­tions progress.