Hootsuite

Pros

I was one of the early adapters using Hootsuite. Originally all the options blew me away! Awesome to have on one dashboard all my social networks with multiple tabs in front of me. I also love that I could schedule the same posts and click off on multiple social networks. It's really good for marketers who can re-use content across multiple clients accounts, for example if I run a social media marketing agency and can use similar food content across all the food social media accounts that I follow. I also had liked I could build the posts in an excel and import it. I like your "university" and offering classes!!! I like your reports.

Cons

Overtime as social media space evolved there were functions I wished you had sooner. Instagram posting and scheduling was very clunky when it first came out that it had to notify my clients to push through the Instagram post that I had done. It took you a while to integrate Pinterest. I'm not sure if you're able to let me schedule on someone's personal Facebook account (I know this was on Facebook but I wish this was easier to do!) . Hootsuite mobile-I personally don't use your mobile. I only use Hootsuite on desktop because of the breadth of multiple social networks and tabs.

Pros

Hootsuite is a great free solution for basic social media management. I enjoy the dashboard customizations, where you can pull in different channels and features (ex: posts, timelines, mentions, etc.) all in one easy-to-manage interface. It also makes social listening easy versus having to log in and manage notifications manually on each individual platform.

In general, Hootsuite is easy to learn given some experience with other SaaS platforms. The interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. And, they offer a ton of free resources to help you get up to speed with the platform and social media management in general, which is nice.

With the free version, you can manage three social profiles. This is great for personal use or for managing in-house social, but not ideal for agencies or managing multiple clients/accounts. Surprisingly, however, you can schedule as many posts as you want within those three profiles, which is great for advanced planning.

Cons

The integrations and features/functionality could be better. I personally prefer to use HootSuite to schedule tweets and prefer to schedule other content for Facebook and LinkedIn within the actual platforms. It's fine to use HootSuite in a pinch, but you are able to do a lot more customizations within the individual platforms. Kind of a pain to do it separate/manually, but you get a better post/product in return. For example, you often can't add multiple images to a post or do a carousel-style post as you could directly within Facebook.

Like most SaaS products that have a free version, there are limitations. For anything more than managing in-house or personal social, you'd likely need to invest in one of the paid plans and really compare what's offered in HootSuite vs some of the other more enterprise solutions.

The reporting is also fairly limited and you'll likely have to work within the platforms directly or use other tools to get a full picture of social media performance.

Pros

I used to do full-time social media management and was using Hootsuite constantly to schedule posts for my clients and track social conversations and mentions in real time. I love how simple and easy it is to use – you'd never think multiple columns across your screen would work or keep you sane... but it gets the job done! I can easily respond to people, retweet it, flag it and more. Another awesome think I love about Hootsuite is the ability you have to help gather content. I was constantly looking for things to retweet to get engaged with others online, so I used one of my columns to track particular keywords. I could then get real-time tweets and posts from people talking about the topics I wanted to engage with and retweet for the brands I was managing. Honestly that made my job 100x easier!

Cons

I do know it has been a little clunky for me in the past. Sometimes keyword columns won't update and I've had to delete and recreate the search – or I would schedule posts and the photos wouldn't go out. I think they have fixed some of these issues over the years. There is also a maximum number of columns you can create in the free version, so I sometimes ran into issues where I wanted to use more features but couldn't. But, overall, I appreciate the value I got for the $$.

Pros

Really easy to use and so many resources. The platform is brilliant for scheduling and you don't even have to visit the other social platforms to post and engage with the audience. You can really customise the streams for each user which is great for productivity, and the analytics is really useful.

As a manager, I only have to hop into the publisher section to see what posts are going out, how often we're posting, and what platform we're using most.

Using the streams, I can set up one for all posts to check consistency and monitor engagement, one for competitor research, and one for searches, and then more platform specific streams so I can really dive into the nitty-gritty if I need to.

Cons

It's very Twitter orientated, most of the useful streams like monitoring topical conversations etc are in Twitter (probably by nature of the Twitter platform), but I would like to see more feature on LinkedIn - so far there's only TWO streams; one to monitor Company Updates, and second to monitor scheduled posts (I can see this in the publisher planner anyway).

It would be good to see similar monitoring streams for Hashtag conversations because this feature is applicable in LinkedIn as well as Twitter.

The Publisher also feels like it's just missing something and I think it's the ability to 'plot' in posts rather than drafting out complete posts. For example when we're planning what activity we want to launch, we might not know what the full post is going to look like, but we might just want to plot in ideas which at the moment we have to do on a spreadsheet and then translate over to the Hootsuite publisher. It would be good to see this feature in the planner where we can plot ideas, and then fully draft them out later.

Pros

As a Hootsuite user for 7 years now, it is by far my favorite social media management software. Creating, optimizing, and posting social media for different platforms, etc. takes a lot more time than you would expect. Not only do you have to craft each post to fit each platform you’re posting to… you have to choose the best time, use the right hashtags, shorten URLS, and include something interesting (i.e. picture, video, content). Overall, what many believe will only take them 10 minutes, in reality it can take up 2-5 (or more) hours of your work week; even more when you include the content creation for the actual posting. Hootsuite is the best tool for compiling all your social media efforts into one dashboard you can work from and will definitely knock hours off your work week.

PROS
The best feature of Hootsuite is the time you will gain. Most social media platforms have a scheduling aspect to them but having to manually log in and out of each one, to do so, is not feasible or conducive for speed. Hootsuite provides you with analytics on each of your chosen platforms, located in its dashboard, to help you identify the most optimal time(s) to schedule each post to be sent out; this especially comes in handy for days you know you will be on the go and/or do not have access to technology. You can also scroll through past social media posts, save unfinished drafts, and boost posts for content promos; which will provide you with more insight and/or a better understanding of which of your efforts and/or CTA’s are working best. Hootsuite’s platform has various analytics and reports you can export so your team(s) can measure things like conversion rates, marketing and sales initiatives, and improvements in monthly social capital. One of the neat things about this platform is the option to purchase additional social media management applications for things like YouTube Analytics and video posting, Wordpress blog analytics and posting, Google Analytics, etc. Hootsuite also provides the option to export reports (including customized reports) on any of the platforms connected to your account, to measure competition, areas of improvement, click stats, and which platform is bringing in the largest amount of traffic to your website/content, etc.

Because the company I work for uses another third-party application (Lead Liaison) to track visitors and traffic sources to our website, we use the free version of Hootsuite.

Cons

One of the cons of Hootsuite is its inability to detect whether or not your traffic is originating from an actual human or an automated bot. This can interfere with your data and make it hard to decipher if the data you have access to is valid or not; this is true for Google Analytics as well. To avoid this, we use a third-party application for visitor tracking (Lead Liaison).

You may get notifications that your social network(s) have been disconnected from your dashboard; don’t worry, you simply just have to reconnect them. Although I am not sure why this happens so often, I trust that this has nothing to do the security of my account and I always receive notifications when I sign in to my account from a new device, etc.