Testing Seesmic to manage my social media life

I have been a happy user of Hootsuite for a few months now. Previously, I was using TweetDeck. I started using Hootsuite mainly because it was a web application and not a desktop app. And still today, I’m pretty satisfied with it. But like a real geek that I am, I’m always looking for the next best thing :-).

I’ve been hearing about Seesmic for a while now, but never had the time to give it a test run. Well, last night, I was not sleeping, so why not test Seesmic instead of simply wasting time ;-).

First impression: very cool! The fact that it has a desktop AND a web client is very cool. As previously mentioned, I need a web client as I want to be able to use the software on any computer I. That’s a pre-requisite for me. But a desktop client can also be very neat. And of course, it has an iPhone app. Which isn’t even a requirement in my opinion. If you don’t have an iPhone app, then you are simply not worth my time ;-).

So I first tested the web client. It asks you to create an account so it can remember your social media accounts and preferences. Nice but kind of essential, don’t you think ? I could easily add my different Twitter accounts, my Facebook page as well as the Fan page of INBOX, ImpressCMS and a few others I’m managing.

For each social media account, you can easily add different kinds of columns, like Home, Mentions, Sent, etc… The Status update textbox is very slick. It’s discrete, but can fit a lot things like image, link, location, etc…

So far, interesting, but still very similar to Hootsuite. Oh, but one thing missing already: I did not find a way to schedule a tweet for later… That’s a feature I use a lot in Hootsuite…

Now let’s have a look at the desktop client. Downloaded, installed, opened. First thing that surprised me: I’m asked to add my social media accounts. Why can’t I simply log in with the username and password I created on the web client ? You guys should already have all my info already… Big downer…

But I play the game and I added all my different accounts again. Same principle again, you can configure different columns and tell Seesmic what you want to see inside those columns. However, on the left, there are 4 tabs: All, Accounts, Userlists and Searches. I’m still a little bit confused as to their purpose. It seems it would have been better to allow the user to create any tabs he wants with any columns inside.

The status update textbox is similar to the web version. A cool thing however, is the integration of Klout. At the bottom of each tweet, you can see the Klout score of the author as well as his influential topics. I found this interesting. Hootsuite can give you the Klout score of an author but you actually need to click on the user’s name or picture in order to see it.

Now, I clicked on the Retweet button in a tweet and it prompted me to select from which account I wanted to retweet. I selected an account and it retweeted automatically without me having the possibility to edit it. So Seesmic is using the « Twitter » retweet feature and not the « traditional » retweet feature. That sucks. If you don’t know why, I suggest reading Why the traditional RT is better than the Twitter version. Maybe there is a way to customize how retweets are made, but I did not find it.

Then, I downloaded the iPhone app. Launched it and, as it was to be expected, I did not get asked for my Seesmic username and password, I was asked again to add each of my social media accounts. Too much trouble, I didn’t even went through it.

So, I was excited for a short while, and then I came back to earth. Even with his small annoyances, Hootsuite, is still the best, at least for me!