I fired up HootSuite this morning as I always do and found–a new tab!
Replacing the Pending Tweets column, the new Publisher tab (button?) sits below the Home tab on the left. All of your scheduling now takes place here.
HootSuite claims this is an easier and more effective way to manage your messages. There’s a Calendar in beta for Past Scheduled tweets, an option for RSS Feeds (which I don’t know why, yet), and filters for profiles and team members.
The problem? Maybe I’m just too used to the ease and flexibility of seeing my Pending messages right there with the rest of my core columns–but maybe that’s the point. I do a lot of retweeting–there are a lot of great people out there with great resources to share–and if I’m scheduling tweets to pop off throughout the day, I’m going to be looking for them in my Home Feed on my core page or popping over to my custom keyword tabs. It’s not intuitive for me to set up a tweet and then go off to a tab on the left just to see what time I should tweet it. And if I’m sending a “real time” tweet, I certainly don’t want it to go at the same time a previously scheduled one goes. My memory’s not that good!
ETA: As of June 16, Publisher has active URLs and hashtags in scheduled messages.
The second thing I don’t like is you can’t click on the URLs or hashtags in your “Scheduled” messages in the Publisher tab. Every so often I get paranoid and am compelled to double-check my links. Or I’m not sure if the hashtag I just made up really exists. The old Pending tab let you click on both URLs and hashtags right in the tweet to ease your mind. The new Publisher tab doesn’t. You can, of course, use your mouse to copy and paste the URL in a new tab or window, or open up Twitter Search for the hashtag. Extra steps added to an already busy day.
ETA: As of June 24, the Publisher and Pending stream are now interchangeable.
And perhaps the third thing is we don’t have a choice to keep the Pending tab in lieu of the Publisher.
The whole reason I use HootSuite for my corporate account is not for the set-it-and-forget-it mentality, but so I can schedule informative and hopefully useful tweets to go off during the day while I have to be busy doing other social media/community manager things. This allows me to pop in and out of the Twitter realm and respond to people and have a good time engaging and learning around the automated stuff. Using ow.ly gives me access to some good free analytics as well. And the one up side so far for Publisher is it updates without me having to refresh the tab.
But I use Tweetdeck for my personal account, and if it weren’t for their lack of built-in analytics, I’d think they were superior for business purposes, and not just because I can still see everything at a glance.
Is the new Publisher tab something that makes sense if you have a lot of people on your account, or multiple accounts? Should I as a sole user give it a fair chance? Or should I grumble my way to Tweetdeck? 🙂
Author Becky Benishek 
You captured my morning thoughts on this change very well all the way down to double checking links and #hashtags. To-date, I’ve not been a big tweetdeck user, but seriously considering it. To share a lesson I learned the hard way, if tweet deck is down for any reason, the ow.ly links are broken.
Thanks Becky!
Diahann
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You are very welcome!
I have always used HootSuite for corporate accounts, so am loathe to change, because up until now it’s been pretty friendly. And I love those owls.
But we did just purchase Raven Tools to help with tracking Twitter analytics, which makes switching to Tweetdeck almost a no-brainer, especially if I use the corporate bit.ly.
Well, I’m not ready to switch yet, so we’ll see how things are by the end of the day.
Thanks for your response!
Becky
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Thanks for the feedback Becky, we appreciate your thoughtful post and candid opinions. We work diligently to build tools which will help businesses and organizations use social media with increased confidence and success but had a wee bit of stumble out of the gates today.
We’re making a few technical refinements to improve performance but in general, think the Publisher tool will be a huge help for planning complex campaigns – especially with drag-n-drop timeslots and in-line editing, but sudden change can cause frustration.
With that in mind, we understand your concerns about the loss of the pending stream and are gathering data to learn what attributes of the Pending Updates stream customers relied on most – i’ll Tweet you a link to a survey to help us understand more.
Keep the feedback coming, we’re listening.
@daveohoots and the rest of the Owls
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Dave,
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
It was indeed a bit of a set back to come in this morning to find things a bit awry–as you know, time is at a premium when you’re dealing with the online world, and social media/community managers tend to schedule more than just tweets. I schedule time just so I CAN tweet. Having to work around what seemed to be a less-than-efficient fix out of the gate was a bit disconcerting.
But here I am at the end of the day and have obviously survived, and using that tab did get easier as I went along. I’m still thinking the new feature is more useful for people with multi-user accounts or multiple accounts or both. And we haven’t yet used HootSuite for a complex campaign.
I appreciate your concern over my feedback and will look for that survey link.
Thanks again!
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Thanks again for your feedback about our recent Publisher release.
I am glad to announce you an update to the dashboard including the return of the Pending Updates stream.
The Publisher and Pending stream are now interchangeable allowing you to schedule and manage with your preferred tool. In most cases, your previous Pending Update streams will also re-appear.
While we were at it, we increased the limit on Batch Scheduling to 200 per social network (in batches of 50) and improved support for international character sets.
Please take a spin and let us know what you think: http://owl.li/5oj2e
Thanks
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Wow. Love the changes. Thank you for bringing back the Pending stream–and the fact that it’s interchangeable with the Publisher tab makes so much sense.
And thank you for following up. Your team rocks.
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