This article was co-authored by Anzil Amina.
In this post, we'll take a look at three popular tools for building a social media calendar on Twitter: Buffer, Hootsuite, and our own product, Chirr App. Having built a Twitter marketing tool ourselves, we understand how these tools suit different types of marketers.
This blog post will cover an overview of each platform:
Let’s dive in.
An overview of Chirr App
Who is Chirr App for?
Chirr App is a tool for experts and teams that want to build a professional social media presence on Twitter. While Chirr App does have a LinkedIn integration, its strength is that it has been purposefully designed to enhance the Twitter experience. Chirr App is what Twitter would look like if it were redesigned for publishing thoughtful content, rather than consuming information. As a result, Chirr App is hands down the best marketing tool you’re focusing on Twitter as your main social channel.
Main Differentiator: designed for writing and scheduling Twitter threads.
At its core, Chirr App is built around an editor for writing and scheduling Twitter threads. Rather than having to write tweets on Twitter’s tiny little compose box, Chirr App lets you compose your content in a large Google Docs-like editor.
One of the biggest problems with publishing on Twitter is how few characters you can squeeze into a tweet. The way most people get around this is to reply to their own tweets and string together multiple tweets into something called a Twitter thread. Creating Twitter threads on Twitter can be a pain. You have to write everything out in a Google doc or notepad first, then use a character counter to chop everything up into 280-character chunks, and then you had to paste each little chunk into Twitter individually. It can be a tedious process, and any mistakes mean you had to start the whole process over.
With Chirr App, you can write everything out as you would in a normal text editor. It suggests where to split the text into individual tweets, and it shows you a preview of what it looks like once published on Twitter. You can move things around and make as many adjustments as you want, and then you can publish everything directly to Twitter from within the app, or you can schedule it for later.
Key Features
Organized drafts and folders - Chirr App is built around the principles of helping people put time and attention into what they say on social media. We build a drafts module to encourage people to work on ideas over time and refine what they want to say. We’ve also recently added draft folders to the tool, so now you can work on several different types of content pillars and organize them neatly into different draft folders.
Scheduling and Analytics - Chirr App makes it easy to batch your writing and schedule out Twitter posts a few weeks in advance. You can see when everything is scheduled on our content calendar, and lots of different ways that you can queue content. Our analytics module also makes it easy to periodically review what type of content has been performing best.
Team Features - Chirr App has a host of team features that make it easy to collaborate on Twitter content production. Our teams plan lets you add an unlimited number of teammates to your workspace, and you have permission controls for different users. You’ll never have to share your company’s Twitter credentials ever again.
Chirr App also makes it easy for team members to respond to comments and support queries on Twitter. Having an interface where you can respond to people outside of Twitter means that your team won’t get lost in a world of social media distractions at work.
LinkedIn Cross-posting - While Chirr App has been designed for writing and scheduling content on Twitter, we do also have a mechanism for cross-posting your Twitter threads to LinkedIn once they’re published.
Pricing
Chirr App is free to use and always will be.
The free plan includes the ability to write and publish Twitter threads up to 10 tweets long.
If you want to want to write threads more than 10 tweets long and you want to be able to create drafts and work on tweets over time, our plus plan costs $4 a month (or $30 for an annual plan)
Access to the scheduling, analytics, and LinkedIn modules comes without Pro plans at $15 a month (or $144 a year), and our team plan costs $49 a month with unlimited teammates (or $470 a year).
Chirr App Reviews
The Scholarcy team’s opinion (select the review tab) : ‘We love the Chirr App extension here at Scholarcy. It's such an easy way to turn a summary of an article into a Twitter thread, complete with images and video if you wish.’
Another satisfied user of Chirr App: ‘I've been using this app for about a year now. For a free app it has a ton of stuff out of the box that save my life - like rearranging tweets and threads (even sent ones) and saving drafts (i can't remember how many threads I've lost on the regular twitter app).
But where it shines is if you choose to upgrade. It's every function on twitter. Just done better.’
And this is what Nadya Tsech had to say about Chirr App: ‘Twitting quotes from articles is very easy. I like both the Chirr App extension and getchirrapp.com for creating threads. Recommend to everyone who's regularly posting tweets.’
Overview of Buffer
Who is Buffer for?
Buffer is a great social media manager for small businesses and teams. Unlike Chirr App, Buffer is built for many social media channels.
The trade-off is that its Twitter editor, publishing, analytics, and scheduling tools are nowhere near as powerful as Chirr Apps. For example, you cannot write Twitter threads in Buffer.
If your audience lives on Twitter and you want a dedicated tool to manage your Twitter presence, then Chirr App is the better option. However, if you’re a small business and you want to publish the same content on as many channels as you can, then Buffer is the tool for you.
A great general-purpose scheduler for small businesses
Buffer publishing tools focus on three things: Scheduling content across multiple channels, analyzing how well the content performed and engaging with any interaction across your channels.
If you're starting out and you’re not sure which social media channel you want to focus on, then Buffer is the best place to start. It’s easy to set up and simple to use.
Key Features
Scheduling to multiple social networks - Buffer lets you draft and schedule posts for sharing across multiple social networks, including Facebook, Google Business Profiles, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Shopify, TikTok and Twitter.
Team Features - Buffer make is easy for small collaborate on social media content production. There is an approval process to review posts before they get published and teams can easily share and manage access to each social account. Buffers engagement module also lets your team attend to all your unanswered comments in one simple dashboard.
Custom Reports - Buffer helps you monitor your content’s performance and it lets you export and white label custom reports that can be automatically sent to different stakeholders.
Pricing
Buffer lets you manage 3 channels with a limit of 10 posts per channel on its free version.
To remove these limits or add additional channels Buffer charges $6 per month per channel. For unlimited teammates, Buffer charges $12 per month per channel.
Reviews of Buffer
This is what Tracy O. said after using Buffer: ‘Buffer was a great tool to start learning how to plan and schedule content to social media ahead of time. It's very easy to use and even my not so tech savvy clients managed to use it and enjoy using it.’
‘For the most part its easy to use but their product suite is confusing to understand when purchasing a subscription.’
'Pros: Powerful, interactive, and one place for almost all the required features to run campaigns in this dynamic and fast moving world. I can monitor and study customer responses of different social media platforms from one place.
Cons: The only serious problem that hurdles my work is glitches that occur when you try to upload multiple images at the same time. I think this problem should be tackled on first priority because companies don’t work on a single project for the whole week.'
An overview of Hootsuite
Who is Hootsuite for?
Hootsuite is the enterprise solution. Much like Buffer, it lets you manage and publish across various social media channels, but it has a much more robust set of tools for larger organizations.
As with buffer, the trade-off here is that its Twitter-specific functionality is much less specialized than Chirr App’s. For example, you cannot write Twitter threads in Hootsuite.
Hootsuite lets you schedule content across various social media platforms, but it has a lot more sophisticated publishing tools for larger organizations and an ecosystem of apps and integrations. For example, enterprise accounts can take care of security and compliance concerns with an integration to Proofpoint that screens and analyses content before it gets published.
Key Features
Scheduling to multiple social networks - Hootsuite lets you draft and schedule posts for sharing across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and Twitter.
Monitoring - Hootsuites real strength is its monitoring capabilities. The platform has an interface that lets you set up streams, like Twitter feeds, that let you zero in on essential topics, trends, and social profiles. Their inbox module is also great for responding to interactions across channels.
Insights - Hootsuite provides a powerful analytics module with comprehensive data on social media performance. If you manage an agency, you know the difficulties in calculating social media ROI. The Analytics function in Hootsuite makes it easier for you to showcase your deliverables.
Pricing
Hootsuite has four categories for pricing. It includes professional, team, business, and enterprise.
If you pay bills yearly, they charge $49/m, $179/m, and $739/m for professional, team, and business plans. Enterprise custom plan requires you to contact for pricing.
'Professional' plan covers one user and ten social accounts. You can choose the 'team' plan for three users and twenty social accounts. The'Business' plan allows you to use thirty-five social accounts and five users. You can choose the Enterprise Custom plan for unlimited users and over fifty social accounts.
All the subscription plans are also available for a free trial period of 30 days.
Reviews of Hootsuite
This is what Cassandra D has to say about Hootsuite: ‘Overall I feel that Hootsuite is expensive for what it offers and other platforms have better functions for things like evergreen content and reusing content.’
Hootsuite is not the best option for customers with a tight budget. And it is evident by this review: ‘Solid app with good stability misses out many features if you are on a lower plan.’
Anthony J. said this about Hootsuite: ‘Overall its been pretty good. Im not a big social media fan so I like it to be as simple as possible to get my message across.’
This is what Astor S. said: 'I was excited to start using Hootsuite for the simple reason that I needed help managing my accounts. Like the very easy dashboard and functionality.'
Conclusion
Chirr App is an excellent tool if you want to focus your social media presence on Twitter. Its Twitter-specific capabilities are unmatched by either of the other two tools. If your main focus is Twitter, then Chirr App is your best choice.
Buffer is a better option for you if you're a small team with broad social media goals. Hootsuite is the right choice for large enterprises, they offer a much more comprehensive suite of tools than Buffer, but the tradeoff is that the interface has a steeper learning curve.
Chirr App is an all-in-one Twitter tool that helps you write threads and tweets, engage with your audience, and access actionable analytics so you could write amazing content consistently.