There is also a free option, however you will likely need to sign up for the premium account because you won’t want all of your followers to be able to publish DM’s to your Twitter timeline. The Premium account will give you features such as Author Whitelisting or Message Moderation. You can use GroupTweet in conjunction with any Twitter client out there, ie Tweetdeck, Twitter.com or even Hootsuite’s free version…

It’s definitely a tough call though – especially for someone who manages social media profiles for several clients. It might be worth it to set up accounts for clients through TweetDeck.

Oh well…. we are checking out alternatives where a heads up would likely have lead to brand loyalty and money from us.

But, in the end, I agree that it’s not very often that a company pulls away the things they offered for free. Typically, services will offer extra benefits for paid customers instead of taking away what had already been free. I’m sure that if they had to start all over again, HootSuite would have done more limiting of the free features from the beginning. It’s always nice for your customers to feel like they’re getting a lot more if they take a paid option instead of making them feel like you’re crippling their efforts UNLESS they pay for the features they used to get for free.

Thanks again for the comment, I hope you like the site!

We can’t afford to stick around and watch what happens next with HootSuite. We have already started switching everyone over to a new provider because time is money and they have already wasted a bunch of ours with the changes.

As a general tech user, I think it is stupid and extremely irritating to take features that have always been free and start to charge for them. I know that we are just one set of users, but we are one set that they have lost.