Why I quit using the 5 best YouTube and Twitter tools

I started building this tool because not only was I paying for 5-6 YouTube and Twitter tools at once (and paid/tried 10+ more), but I wasn't getting what I felt I needed from them to grow.

• They didn't help me stay consistent
• They only showed me trends from within one platform
• There were no social elements to help me network (shockingly)
• They helped me regurgitate content, not ideate new stuff

They weren't bad tools, some had excellent features that I'll be re-building into CloutQuest (albeit wrapped in a bit more fun).

Let's look at some of the pros and cons for the top 5 tools I used.

YouTube Tools

You would think there would be an abundance of tools aimed at YouTube creators, but surprisingly there aren't. There are a few big ones, and the rest are aimed at companies that want to manage their multiple marketing channels.

The only two tools that are even worth mentioning here.

VidIQ and TubeBuddy

Both products are comparable, and a variety of reviews online (mostly written by the companies themselves) will go into why A is better than B or vice versa, but overall they are aimed at directly the same audience, in the same way.

Which... is annoying, because it makes it truly hard to decide which to go with.

Their pricing pages lay out their feature sets nicely, and also give you an idea of their price points.

I will say this, I went with VidIQ for no good reason at all. In fact, at one point I had both extensions installed and suffered catastrophically as they both fought over the same space on YouTube.

One thing that is great about both is that they have vibrant Discord channels that you can join, which helps you network and get feedback. But since it's so unstructured and overpowering I found them both hard to utilize and navigate. Big Discord channels are also a hassle to keep track of.

Some of the things that get added to YouTube with the extension is great, but I've seen a lot of complaints (and have some of my own) about how much it impacts the YouTube UI. Overall, the designs aren't that great either and could use a modernization update.

Here are some things I liked about them:

• They are great for optimizing your SEO
• They add some wonderful pieces to the YouTube UI (not all)
• They have vibrant and helpful communities

There are other YouTube tools available, but they never spoke to me as a smaller creator. They all seem either aimed at enterprise, sterile, lacking a reason to use them over their competitors, or highly overcomplicated (CRM style).

Here's a list of them for the Google gods though, and just as an honorable mention. No hate towards people building tools for others, go get em folks.

• Morning Fame
• Tubics
• Planable
• Social Blade (amazing for what it does)
• Social Champ
• Agora Pulse

Twitter (X) Tools

Now here we have a lot more to choose from. I've tried countless Twitter tools over the years, and only a few stuck out to me.

Tweet Hunter

This was one of the first Twitter tools I ever discovered, back when it was a much simpler product. Watching it grow has been awesome, and it's come a long way.

The basic gist of it is that you can find trending tweets, reformat them to your niche/wording, and then schedule them. There are some other things in there like auto-dm, retweets after 12 hours, automatically plugging your blog (or soundcloud 😂) after X amount of time, scraping tweet commenters, and a bunch of other stuff. It also has pretty decent analytics.

I swore by this tool for a long time, but when Twitter did a crackdown on their API and it stopped working (for a while, even after using my own API key), I moved to other tools that weren't broken out of necessity.

Interesting tweet from the founder Tibo.

By the way Elon, shutting off APIs for third parties was a terrible mistake in my opinion. The tail end of developers that build on top of a platform makes that platform far more valuable. YouTube, Google Play, and endless other examples are proof of that.

Typefully and Hypefury

These are both uncluttered comparable tools.

They give you the necessities, without a lot of the bullshit.

Back when I tried Typefully the first time, there was not much to it. You could manage your schedule slots (when and how many times a day to post a tweet), and then write tweets that would get put into those slots.

Looking at it today, there seems to have been a lot of work done on it. There's this neat little command palette with things that weren't there before, and the design has been polished a little.

I tried this out after it was recommended by some friends, and I was a little disappointed. I looked at it today and I see that there have been a lot of updates, and there's this cool new palette, but at the time it was very barebones. Perhaps that's why those friends liked it.

If I recall correctly the main pain point that got me to drop it was that I couldn't just schedule a tweet easily when done, I had to select the slot every time. They did have this very cool feature where you could share a drafted tweet with others and have them comment on it.

Hypefury is where I ended up for a long while, though I've since pulled back on Twitter and stopped my subscription. It didn't have a lot of clutter, was well priced ($15/month) and gave me all I needed, which was scheduling tweets.

It's a lot like Tweet Hunter, but without the AI rewriting, and swipefile-esque direction. I think the auto-DMs were under the more expensive plan, but I never used those anyway.

I quit using all of them

Writing killer tweets, researching video topics, and creating auto-dm campaigns is great. But for me, the problem was that I just couldn't "find the time or energy" to keep going.

The tools were helpful, but they were either adding more energy spend to my content creation tasks, or not rewarding enough to use.

The feeling of having a tweet go viral (I've had it happen quite a few times) is incredible, but it mutes even moderate successes afterward. You could get 100 likes on a tweet and it won't be meaningful anymore because your goalposts have shifted.

These tools don't do anything to combat that, and it leaves you as a content creator demoralized and unmotivated because the duration between two viral tweets could be a month.

It's a shame, because all of these tools have excellent features that do indeed help you, but cater primarily to the most successful and already disciplined creators who can drag themselves along.

I guess that's the biggest problem I'm trying to solve for myself with CloutQuest. I want something to hit me with that dopamine at the right times to create good habits in my brain instead of always chasing those viral pieces of content, because it's unrealistic and harmful.

Edit: Apparently I've been paying for Tweet Hunter this whole time (over a year without using it)... sigh.