Twitter-owned TweetDeck is taking steps into HootSuite territory by adding the ability to share photos in scheduled posts and, perhaps more importantly, for social teams to work together on a shared queue of posts.
The announcement yesterday on Twitter’s blog focused on being able to include photos on tweets scheduled in advance. It’s a feature HootSuite, the leading social media management dashboard, has had for years. However, HootSuite’s offering is hampered by the fact that photos delivered thorough its platform only are displayed if a user clicks the link. Photos posted with TweetDeck, on the other hand, are displayed in-line and more likely to be noticed and engaged with.
Another differentiator for HootSuite, and other services for team management of multiple Twitter accounts, has been the shared queue of scheduled messages. The queue enables social teams to work out of the same scheduled-tweet bucket, editing, tweaking and/or adjusting the timing of publishing.
Twitter, which acquired TweetDeck three years ago this month, is now offering that in TweetDeck and also its ads.twitter.com product: “Perhaps more important, we’ve unified Twitter’s scheduling systems so that for the first time, Tweets scheduled through TweetDeck will be visible on ads.twitter.com and vice versa, ensuring you are always in the picture as to which content is being scheduled.”
To be clear HootSuite and other paid services offer more sophisticated dashboards — including analytics and the ability to give different permission levels to team members — but the new TweetDeck features make it a good option for small businesses or marketers with limited budgets.
The new features are available now on the web, Windows and Chrome versions of TweetDeck and are coming soon to the Mac app.
Postscript: This post has been updated with the correct day of Twitter’s announcement.
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