I’ve recently been playing with two different web applications that let me manage multiple Twitter accounts for clients: HootSuite and CoTweet.  I wanted to offer a comparison between the two.  Readers who are interested may also want to check out this comparison by Rafe Needleman of Webware.

Both tools are meant to offer ways for companies to professionally manage their presence on Twitter.  They enable you to manage multiple Twitter accounts by scheduling tweets to be posted over time.  This is great for the person who wants to post all of their tweets first thing in the morning (or the week!) and let it run on autopilot from there.  Both apps also let you see statistics about your tweets.

COTWEET: As Rafe notes, the CoTweet interface is cleaner.   The design resembles an email inbox, making it easy and intuitive from the start.  CoTweet also offers some powerful tools for sharing Twitter responsibilities among multiple people.  It allows you to give multiple users access to a Twitter account and, more importantly, allows you to assign incoming tweets to different people for response.  This is a very powerful feature if you’ve been tasked with managing the Twitter account for your company and want to delegate tweet-back responsibilities to people within your organization based on their areas of expertise.  Imagine, for example, that you were Entertainment Weekly, and wanted some incoming tweets to be answered by your Film editor, some answered by your Television editor, some answered by your Music editor, etc.

The one major drawback to CoTweet at this point is that it is not integrated with Ping.fm.  Ping.fm is a tool that allows me to post updates to all my social media outlets at once - Facebook (and, in the case of businesses, Facebook fan pages) being chief among them.  I have found that I often want my Facebook status updates to match my tweets.  Unfortunately, Facebook does not make it easy to import your tweets to Facebook as status updates.  At the moment, you can export your status updates to Twitter, but not the other way around.  There are some workarounds, but they are very convoluted.  So while CoTweet is a great tool for professionally managing your Twitter account, it won’t help you with your Facebook.

For me, this is a major limitation, but one I was eventually able to get around using a Facebook application called “Selective Twitter Status.”  This allows you to import your tweets as status updates by including “#fb” on the end.  Most importantly, it works on both Facebook profiles and Facebook fan pages, and you can use a different Twitter account for each page.  I’d still prefer to have CoTweet integrate with Ping.fm so it updates all of my social networks, but from a business standpoint (and this is a business tool), as long as I have Twitter and Facebook covered I’m feeling pretty good. (Note: Facebook has some funky issues when updating the status of profiles and pages with the same tool, so if you don’t grant permissions in the proper order it can cause problems.  It took me several attempts to sort this all out.)

HOOTSUITE: Hootsuite shares many of the same features as CoTweet.  You can use it to manage multiple accounts and schedule tweets for later delivery.  The interface resembles TweetDeck with its multiple columns, rather than an email inbox.  This isn’t as clean, but once you grow accustomed to it, it’s still fairly usable.  Moreover, HootSuite lets you customize your page with additional columns and tabs.

An additional features I like with HootSuite is the Hootlet, a bookmarklet that let’s me tweet any page with a click of a button.  Just drag the Hootlet to the bookmark bar of your browser and you’re ready to go!  Another nice advantage of HootSuite is that you can go back and edit and scheduled tweet before its sent.  With CoTweet, you need to delete the tweet and start over.

Unlike CoTweet, HootSuite does not have any CRM functions.  You cannot assign tweets to other people or track the follow-up.

The big advantage of HootSuite is that it is integrated with Ping.fm, which means you can use it to manage all of your social media outlets, not just Twitter.  So I can use it schedule all of my Facebook pages updates in addition to my Twitter updates.  Unfortunately, HootSuite is only set up to handle one Ping.fm account, even though it can handle multiple Twitter accounts.  So you cannot use it to update multiple Facebook fan pages.

RECOMMENDATIONS: Overall, both applications work great.  Given that each has features the other doesn’t, I use CoTweet to handle my incoming Tweets and HootSuite to handle my outgoing tweets.  CoTweet is a more powerful tool when your focus is on providing quality replies to incoming tweets, particularly if you are working for a large company where different employees have different areas of expertise.  If you can get different people in the building to reply to different tweets, this is the tool for you.

For outbound tweets, however, I would choose HootSuite in conjunction with the Selective Twitter Updates application.  First, the Hootlet bookmarklet makes tweeting out a breeze.  Second, HootSuite lets you go back and edit scheduled tweets.  Most importantly, it integrates with Ping.fm, meaning that my outgoing tweets can also be copied to Facebook and my other social media outlets.  Unfortunately, HootSuite can only handle one Ping.fm account (instead of assigning a different Ping.fm account to each Twitter account).  As a result, neither HootSuite nor Ping.fm is ideal for a social media consultant or PR agency handling Facebook updates for multiple companies at once, but as long as you’ve got the Selective Twitter Updates application working with your Facebook page, you’re at least covered on the two important networks, Facebook and Twitter.  I use the Ping.fm integration for my personal Twitter account, so I can also update to LinkedIn, MySpace, Friendfeed, etc.

Overall, I find HootSuite’s integration with Ping.fm and its bookmarlet to be its only major advantages.  CoTweet could easily adopt both of these features - and even build upon it by allowing for multiple Ping.fm accounts - while it would be much more difficult for HootSuite to adopt CoTweet’s CRM functionality and clean interface.  If CoTweet were to integrate with Ping.fm and add a bookmarklet, I would probably use it exclusively.