Columnist Clare Palo explains why #TwitterDown was problematic for social media managers.
This past Tuesday, the unspeakable happened, a true tragedy in the digital realm, and a disaster that is any social manager's worst fear: Twitter went down.
And it wasn’t just a slight lag in Twitter’s interface. Twitter’s API was down for so long that a hashtag — #TwitterDown — was made and went viral in the social stratosphere.
The six hour outage (for some users even longer) sent me into a frenzy, attempting to explain to my roommate why this was such a travesty, when to her it was a typical, slow Wednesday morning.
But what she didn’t understand was that #TwitterDown meant Tweetdeck was down.
I often forget that social media normies, and people existing outside of the #JournalistTwitter community, haven’t heard about the ups and downs of social media scheduling.
One day while eating Mexican food and drinking margs with my non-journalist friends, I explained how scheduling platforms like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck worked. They all looked so relieved, as if social managers were expected to be on social media 24/7 sending out posts and tweets and were never expected to sleep.
For those of you who haven’t heard of programs like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or SocialFlow, let me give you a brief history lesson and you can go back to laughing at Twitter Vines.
Hootsuite was created in 2008 by Ryan Holmes in an effort to manage all of his social media networks when he worked at digital services agency Invoke Media. Holmes sought for a platform that could help him easily curate, manage and monitor all social accounts at once.
Holmes and his team at Invoke Media built his idea into a Twitter social dashboard, originally named Brightkit. It was later renamed Hootsuite in a crowdsourced naming contest, that was inspired by the platform’s logo of an owl and a play on words of the French phrase "tout de suite," meaning "right now."
A year later, Hootsuite expanded to Facebook and LinkedIn, and now supports Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, Foursquare, MySpace and WordPress.
Other social platforms have successfully created similar managing platforms, such as Tweetdeck, which was released around the same time as Hootsuite but only manages accounts for Twitter.
The most notable social scheduling star, and rated number one scheduler by users, is SocialFlow, which not only schedules content with every social network available but uses an algorithm to do so. The technology helps schedule content based on engagement metrics and offers analytical integration as well as data reports for social managers. It rose to fame when SocialFlow released a detailed study that analyzed the death of Osama Bin Laden and the role of Twitter in breaking news journalism.
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So, next time #TwitterDown is trending, think of the weight of its impact. Because us social mangers are just one step away from a Britney Spears head shave #meltdown.
Clare Palo is a senior studying journalism and digital content director for The Post. How did you handle #TwitterDown? Tweet her @clarepalo or email her at cp954211@ohio.edu.
