Why I don’t believe in AutoSchedule in Hootsuite

I am a real fan of Hootsuite. Since 2-3 years it is my favorite Social Media Dashboard, the place, where I feed my different Social Media Channels. Through the Hootsuite client I have access to Facebook, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare WordPress and Google +-Pages. Absolutley a great way to manage all these accounts. And even better: Hootsuite is not only available on my Mac or in the browser. I am working in the same environment with mobile clients on my iPhone and iPad.  The only shortfall I am experiencing for a while is on the iPad. When I use the Hootlet-AddOn (the integration into the Firefox- and Safari-Toolbar), I always get the message on the iPad to install the Hootsuite-client, although this client is already there. De- and re-installimg doesn’t help. Ok, not very comfortable, but I can live with it.

We are using the tool on an European level to manage our different  IBM Social Business Social-Media-accounts, monitor and assign tasks to the team members. People just love it: Multichannel-support, mobile support and integration in the browser are just my personal top features. And I was very excited, when Hootsuite announced their Autoschedule-feature. The promise is great:

Whether you’re sharing a webpage, an image, or your own witty musings, AutoSchedule determines the optimal posting times for your favorite social networks. Maximize reach without swamping your followers.

via Easy Scheduling ~ AutoSchedule in the Dashboard – HootSuite Social Media Management.

What a wonderful world. The system thinks for me and publishes the information at the appropriate time to reach a maximum of recipients. But … I have my doubts. I am using the feature for a while and I believe it has a few holes. In particular it has to fight with different language posts and location of the author. I am sitting in Germany posting messages in English and German language. Obviously the German language messages are intended primarily for a German language speaking audience. And this audience is awake and reading most probably at Central European Time. So it doesn’t make sense, that Hootsuite schedules messages later in the evening. The other way around I quite often get the feeling that English language messages are being published to early, in the morning European time, where most of the Americans are still asleep. So an intelligent autoscheduling needs to take care of language, location and intended recipients and their preferred time zone(s)

For me the Autoschedule seems not yet to be a Game Changer, as stated on SocialMediaToday. Guys, don’t want to be unpolite, but there is a world beyond the Americas, in particular in time sof Social Media and the „Social Age“  … ReadWriteWeb did a test of autoscheduling features. They recommend Buffer over Hootsuite and seem to have similar doubts like I have. Both tools are meanwhile integrated in SocialBro, a free service for managing and analyzing Twitter followers and traffic. I haven’t tested Buffer yet due to our committment to Hootsuite in the team. A feature both tools don’t seem to have, is scheduling a message more than ones. This could take care of different time zones and this could raise the awareness for a Tweet or a Facebook-posting.

Do you have any experience to share, in particular around the international requirements I am describing?