I’m going to keep this short and sweet. I’ve said “why?” so many times both yesterday and today, mainly in front of Hootsuite Web instead of the app. I’ve been following and trying to live-tweet Socialbakers’ Engage 2013 event, while trying to work things out in Hootsuite. I’m going to start with the following: the mobile functions don’t always translate to the desktop version.

Can anybody tell me what’s behind the auto-scheduling? When Hootsuite says it’s going to schedule tweets for me, I could just say “yay, great, please do so”. Not me. Hootsuite says it optimises times, but how? Based on what? Based on the best times to catch most of my audience, or based to past times when I had more engagement? So, if on Monday my tweets had so many retweets but more people saw my other tweets in the evening (yet with not as much engagement), will Hootsuite schedule next Monday’s tweet in the morning or the evening?

Can anybody tell me why Hootsuite streams don’t support streaming?

Can anybody tell me why I keep seeing sneaky ads every now and then even after I’ve switched ads off?

Can anybody tell me why Hootsuite is so pushy with showing me ads in the app to say “hey buddy, how about you pay $9.99 a month for our Pro version?” – hey Hootsuite, I got the message. Thanks.

Can anybody tell me why links (including Twitter handles and hashtags) in Twitter bios aren’t clickable within Hootsuite? (seriously, why?)

Can anybody tell me why Hootsuite doesn’t autosave drafts? (Chrome kept crashing in the morning while I was using Hootsuite for work, meaning that the posts I was trying to write were lost – each and every time it crashed; thankfully I saved my posts on a doc first – I love tech, but can’t trust it 100%).

Can anybody tell me why drafts are called templates? (Now I’m being pedantic, but really – everyone else calls them drafts…)

Can anybody tell me why I have to log out and log back in again after I add a stream, just so it can sync with my iPhone app (which I then need to log out from and log back in to see the changes)? Especially with the recent introduction of background refresh in iOS 7, and with the new APIs available on OS X, I don’t see why that’s the case…but then again, I guess it’s also down to the infrastructure of the app.

However, I found something yesterday, thanks to a hat tip from a dear friend of mine, . Remember my hassle from Day 1, where I couldn’t find tweets that ONLY contained my URL? Doing a search for “brnrd” includes tweets that only mention that without linking to my site, and doing a search for “brnrd filter:links” include people who tweet a link AND the word “brnrd” in the same tweet. However, suggested to create a column with the following query: link:brnrd.me

There you have it – that works a treat, and I’m going to keep that stream active.

One more thing I found while live-tweeting – have you ever been to an event that has one hashtag, and in the middle of it a speaker comes up and says “hey guys, tweet with this other hashtag instead for the next 45 minutes”. Well, instead of having to create a new column manually and playing around with search strings (although to add a simple hashtag, creating a hashtag-based stream in Hootsuite isn’t hard at all), just click on the hashtag when you see it in your stream and click on “Add as a stream”, and there you have it – a new stream with a new hashtag. A clever thing that Hootsuite does (which again proves my point from yesterday about Hootsuite not positioning itself as a tool for social experience but for social management) – when you create columns, you can choose which account of yours will manage it by default. So you can have one stream that your personal account replies from, and the next stream can be one that your work account replies from – just a quick account setting and Hootsuite manages that.