I found out about Hootsuite on Wednesday from a good pal over at Drinksology.net.

I have always used tweetdeck to manage my twitter accounts as I have over 10,000 followers and multiple twitter accounts so I was a bit sceptical of using somethign else.

Like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts, sort your tweets and followers into columns and create groups.  What is really cool is the ability to schedule tweets. No one likes to see 15 tweets coming from a user within the space of 30 seconds – it shows that no thought has been put into them and immediately switches people off and makes people hit the ‘unfollow’ button.

Other features include managing your stats, ping.fm integration, clickable hashtags, url shortening and brand monitoring.  HootSuite also has a Search feature, so you can still perform Twitter searches from within the tool, and it even saves the keywords you’ve searched.

What really sold it to me however is this – to keep on top of my favourites in tweetdeck I have to leave it on all the time as it only downloads in realtime. Hottsuite on the other hand downloads past tweets from people I follow. This allows me to flick it on and update very quickly from anywhere in the world!

Of all the twitter clients I have used this is now my new favourite.