#smarterqueue

And it doesn't even tell you what it's done with your stuff: you just press Shift+Enter, and your page is magically populated with your scribblings while you wonder where everything is gone and how to get it back; you look for it, and then you discover it on your Facebook page, much to the confusion of your followers. Thank you, Hootsuite! It is a bug, not a feature, please understand. How hard can it be to put it RIGHT? You guys have had complaints since 2 years ago, maybe earlier, and you've done nothing about it. (And there are several forum threads discussing the topic.) How can you ask us to pay £32 per month for the cheapest usable plan not be able to afford a software developer to address this horrible, malicious keyboard shortcut?

Rip-off as a service

Which leads me to the subject of the cost: the free plan is not usable for anything more than a hobby page, and the £16 price, as shown on the website, is more than misleading: it's half of what you will be charged for the minimal plan. The price shown has 30% discount applied to it (or 25%, I can't remember) and excludes VAT, and you won't be told what you'll be charged; there will be an email to say your first bill is on the way, and you'll simply find the charge to be double of what you expected it to be—that’s if you bother to check your bank or PayPal.

Oh shock, oh horror ... I had a lovely chat with their support team, asking to issue a refund and insisting they keep their half-baked offering of a platform to themselves. To not specify the monthly price on the website (I couldn't find it, anyway), to send an email saying there would be a bill but omitting the amount of the bill, and then to condescend me like they did? ... Poor you. You didn't realise that you'd be charged way more than the £16 you saw on our website! That's a bit silly, huh? Look: there's an asterisk!

I think I am allowed to be slightly surprised to discover I was charged double of what was advertised on the website, plain and clear, no?

The product is not top-grade, in any case. The platform is not exactly intuitive or easy to use. That silly box at the top, in which to type, seemed to drop and fold back in on itself as it pleased, and there were many more things I can’t all remember that annoyed me. The functionality is very basic: the features I wanted, such as campaign management and categorisation, were absent. The analytics are nothing Facebook doesn’t provide. There seems to be a lack of development or developers or investment, or whatever, but all the little niggly annoyances and limitations suggest this is not a professional tool by any means and takes a lot of getting used to.

But it was the attitude of the support team that finished me off. If I only paid for the whole year upfront, they were saying, I'd make a saving: after I had just complained I couldn’t afford £32. £16 x 12 + VAT, whatever that amounts to, sounds just dandy.

It may be a good cash flow generation strategy to you lot; to us, it comes across like we're being taken for a bit of a ride. So, please pass that feedback to your management. I hope to not deal with you in the future. Thanks and bye.

Some things are priceless

And while we're on the subject of money, there's a hint I would like to put out there:

If you're on any sort of a budget at all, don't go anywhere things which don’t disclose their price. Just don't.

One of them I tried, which I found a bit complicated but functional and suited for my needs, gave the impression of being free: there was no mention of any cost anywhere whatsoever. (I can't remember what it was called.) After spending 2 hours to set it up, I did begin to wonder and did a bit of a deeper search—to find that it's free for 30 days, and after that, its wonderful functionality will continue to be available to me from just $999 per month (yes, there’s three nines in that number). Sneaky.

Some of them insist on giving you a demo before telling you the price; so, I'm supposed to wait until next week and then tolerate half an hour’s worth of someone’s hard-sell to find it is either not suitable for my needs or comes with a crazy price tag. Is it really that hard to make a YouTube video and let that be your demo? Obviously.

The usual offerings

Buffer. The mobile app was confusing, and I could never find where to save a draft. Something else was wrong, I can't remember what, though. I just remember I made too many mistakes, both on the web and via the mobile app, and I remember being very annoyed and feeling like giving up every time I used Buffer. For personal social media management, it may be a good option, but not for anything more.

Agorapulse. Gosh, I couldn't figure that one out at all. Where do you publish your stuff? Does it schedule? How? It seemed it was focused around checking user comments and ticking them off as done with publishing and scheduling being an afterthought, if even being at all. It was just weird—and definitely too pricey.

Social Pilot. You can't save a draft—you either publish it or you schedule, but you can't save a draft. How stupid is that?

Sprout Social. The price tag of $99 per month (likely paid annually, but I didn't check) makes it out of the question for me, and I didn’t even try.

Mavsocial looked very promising, but customer support was rubbish and, while everyone else seemed to get their act with adding Facebook pages in order quite soon post-crisis, Mavsocial hadn’t had it sorted it out even a week after I took out the 7-day free trial. The Library (or gallery, I can't remember exactly, and I can't log in to check, because my free trial has expired) seemed like an exciting feature and could have sold it to me, especially the photo editing part (I added a moustache, glasses, and a hat to Furby in minutes, and he was smoking a pipe now!), but after I discovered the editor had reduced the resolution of the saved photos drastically, which made my Tumblr look awful, I wasn't so excited anymore.

Meet Edgar—a nice idea, but somehow, it comes across somewhat unfinished. It's better (and pricier, though) than its doppelgänger Recurpost in that it allows you to pick your colours, but it just seems clunky and unfinished in some way. Recurpost just smacked of a begrudged Meet Edgar developer who branched off to do his own thing, but not before he stole the code. I regret that I paid for a month of Recurpost: anyone who says Harness the Power of Social Media to Make More Money on the front page is likely desperate, alone, and in some sort of exile. The FAQ section is definitely not written by a native English speaker. And what's with the barely pronounceable name? Recur-what? I had to untangle my tongue every time I said it, and in the end, I had to pin the link to my browser's favourites bar because I kept forgetting what it's called. Meet Edgar, on the other hand, was a lot nicer, but in some way, it was toy-like and not enough. And it didn't have Instagram.

Ta-da!

I wanted more, but I didn't quite know what I wanted. And, frankly, I began to despair and started telling myself in strictest terms imaginable, that my demands are too high, my budget is too low, and I have no idea what I’m doing, and I'm going to have to settle for what's available. Until I came across this wonderful little post and tried SmarterQueue (If you want to try it out, sign up with my link and your free trial will be extended to 30 days instead of the usual 14.) Immediately, it became clear what it was I wanted and what I was missing: an easy way to discover new content, useful functionality that is also usable, customisable price plans, and nice YouTube tutorials. I was so pleased to discover SmarterQueue, I did a little happy dance.

It is a miracle of technological advancement, for sure. Just now, I was able to pull up all the posts which have the word 'dog' in them (and I know there aren't many), from the beginning of times of Helicopter Ears:

It works just great, and I like it a lot, and I'm relieved to not have to look any further: no more confusing comparisons, biased recommendations, glowing reviews of unremarkable software, and being misled by bloggers quoting last year's prices. No more free trials. It just works.