Hootlet not working – solution
10 July 2015Hi all. Leigh Frost here.
If you’re like us and you use the Hootlet a lot, this mornings change to Hootsuite may have left you a little frustrated – to say the least!
Testing @HootSuite #Hootlet again. They claim links are appended to tweets, but it hasn't been working. Looking for other options.
— Rick Knight (@GoCatGo) July 10, 2015
hootlet is not working. I don't know what to do. #socialmediaproblems
— Pan Frederick (@PanFred) July 10, 2015
What’s the problem, you ask?
Before today, the Hootlet was a bookmark on your browser that enabled you to go to a page and automatically tweet or schedule a tweet, Facebook post, Google+ update, etc, using the Hootsuite system. It would compile a tweet from the page title and the URL that you could then add to if you wished. It made disseminating information and interesting articles pretty darn simple.
Now, because of new directives from Facebook (which are understandable in some ways) Hootsuite has had to change this so that posts to Facebook aren’t created automatically. However, rather than just tweak the system so that this would only affect Facebook posts, they have pretty much scuppered the all social platforms too.
@seasonworkers_ Hi there! We've made some updates to Hootlet, please see here for more info: http://t.co/w1uJtjiVEd ^SK
— Hootsuite Helpers (@Hootsuite_Help) July 10, 2015
Hootsuite, rightly, says that the URL will still be posted, though this isn’t clear unless you test a tweet.
Need a fix / stop-gap?
Because the Hootlet is a pretty major part of being able to share via your laptop or computer (the mobile app still seems to be working at the moment) here’s a work around. It’s not quite as easy as the original hootlet, but it might be a good stop gap until Hootsuite rethinks this.
Drag and drop this image to your Bookmarks bar and then use in the same way as the Hootlet to post to Twitter. If you still want to be able to use the Hootsuite scheduling facility or want to be able to post to numerous accounts then bookmark this page too: https://hootsuite.com/hootlet/social-share
You can then copy and paste the text from the Twitter created link, into the Hootsuite window. It’s not quite as slick but it’ll do for now!
Please spread the word by testing the Silverlet on this page.
PS. Apologies for the hurriedly written article! I’d normally spend more time proof reading etc, but haste was of the essence… Feel free to contact us with any comments or queries via Twitter or Facebook:
