Multi-account Management for Twitter: Hootsuite vs. Seesmic Desktop

Do you have more than one twitter accounts?

I do. And if you agree that things like blog, twitter can help you build the personal/business brand, it won't be hard to understand that multi-account of twitter is just the practice of marketing theory STP (Segmenting, Targeting, Positioning) in Twitter world--For different segmentation of twitters, we have different accounts with different content to build different but clear brand images.

So how do you manage your twitter accounts? Switch among browsers, web applications or clients as I did before?

Recently I found Seesmic Desktop (SD) and HootSuite (HS) as multi-account management tools for twitter via my digu friends Kitty, and have spent some time testing these two. My review in one word is :

Hootsuite is better and more powerful than Seesmic Desktop on multi-account management, especially for people who use twitter as a business tool.

SD is an Adobe AIR application, and HS is a web-based service. So both of them are available for Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS and Linux. But if you visit Hootsuite with IE6, you may get a warning as follow:

Warning! HootSuite does not support Internet Explorer 6 and lower. Some features may not display, or function, as intended.Please upgrade, or use a different browser.

With SD,(pic via TechCrunch)

you can:

1. Control more than one Twitter accounts in one location
2. See one full Twitter stream for all of your followers on all of your accounts in one column
3. View the window in sereval columns (similar to Tweetdeck), no limited
4. Friend lists to group your followers into lists.
5. Share photos (integrated with TwitPic) and share video via Seesmic ( coming soon)
6. Be able to shorten URLs
7. Open and store searches in different columns which are updated automatically

HS can shorten URLs, but it can not share photos or video right now. No group feature either, and the website can't autofresh to update tweets, replies or DM for you. You need to press F5
( Digu.com, a China clone of twitter can update tweets, replies or DM automatically on the website, so maybe HS can make it in the future too)

But, HS does have some very useful features which SD lacks:

No.1:
Post a tweet from selected or all accounts at a time.

No.2: Profiles management
Manage your different Twitter profiles all from the HootSuite dashboard. No need to log in and out of separate accounts.

No.3: Solution for company twitter-er
HS allows different people to tweet from different places with the same account!
If you have a bunch of people who tweet for your organization, you can add multiple editors for each HootSuite profile as an admin. Each editor has a unique HootSuite login, so you don't need to share the profile's main Twitter password.

No.4 futuretweets
Pre-schedule your tweets.

No.5 Statistics and analysis of link-click within tweets

Use the ow.ly URL shortener ( provided by Hootsuite) to track click-throughs on your links and to monitor which messages perform best with your followers. Visit the Stats tab to monitor total clicks for each Twitter profile.(A sample for one of my tweet )

No.6 Feed your blog to twitter
If you're a blogger and want to send a tweet out to announce your latest blog post, you can add your RSS / Atom feeds into HS in the Settings area, and HS will send automated tweets when your RSS feed is updated ( a twitterfeed within HootSuite)

No.7 Make money with Google AdSense
When you use HootSuite's ow.ly URL shortener, You can even generate money from your tweets by adding Google AdSense code to enable ads on your Tweet links.

It works as follow:( A sample from HootSuite's FAQ )

Conclusion:
If you are looking for the best client to tweet, maybe it's TweetDeck. But if you're looking for the best tool for multi-account management, you should try HootSuite. HootSuite is beautiful, powerful, and especially useful for you or your company to build brands with Twitter.

And one more thing: HootSuite is free!