Hootsuite

I am giving Hootsuite 3 out of 5 and if they improved their speed in the future I would change that to a 5 out of 5.

I left Hootsuite because I found it to be incredibly slow. At Recipe This, both ourselves and our virtual assistants felt this way. The software itself is perfect and wonderful especially for beginners to social media. But it's so slow that you might as well do it manually.

But for me, the reason I joined Hootsuite (we’re going back a few years now) was that you could automatically post to several Facebook Groups at once. It saved a lot of time when Facebook Groups was a big part of peoples online strategy.

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that runs about the average price for this sort of service. As a CMO of Maple Holistics, I think one of the great things about it is that you can upload many posts at once and schedule them for whenever you want them to actually go up on different social media platforms- it saves you a lot of time by letting you plan ahead!



It will also help you keep track of your ROI so that you can see if your business’ money is being put to good use and what you should be focusing on. Another cool feature is that Hootsuite allows you to filter conversations using location, keywords or hashtags in various languages so that you can really get a feel for what people are feeling.



Sure, there are other tools out there, by Hootsuite has proven itself as a valuable asset for a business to use. And with different rates, it can fit the needs of various companies.

I’m using Hootsuite for 2 years + with the premium plan (10 accounts) for my company - Matara Consulting and so far it’s a good value for money. The main pro is that 1 unique tool allows you to do almost you need as a social media manager. The publisher is very powerful for social media marketers: you have a lot of tools in one: schedule, multi-sending, free pics, design and resizing. The reporting tool is less powerful but still useful to share quickly data with clients. The con for me is not to be able to add more social accounts without upgrading the full plan last but not least they should definitely refresh the Homepage for logged people.

Pros:

Fairly fast and relatively easy for onboarding. 

Cons:

It's crazy expensive for the value you get. Lack of Trial for Enterprise package - you can't give it a try before you purchase it. The user-interface, despite its speed, looks outdated. No advanced collaboration features.

Overall Experience:

I used Hootsuite in the past for the clients of my company -  BrainyBees. We manage over 40 social media profiles and we were looking for a reliable, user-friendly, quick and affordable tool. While Hootsuite works okay with 2-3 profiles, it didn't cut it for us as we needed something more (especially for internal and external collaboration), so we decided to switch to Kontentino. 

I would say you should go ahead and use Hootsuite. The ability to manage many social media streams at once gives one a great deal of leverage in one's SMM efforts. You can not only schedule posts in advance, but also have access to analytics that lets you track exactly how well you are faring. As a VP of Marketing at Adzerk, I feel that you can also prepare templates for frequently asked questions and post appropriate responses.

On the flip side, I would say that the cost of using analytics is an issue. Also, it is expensive when used with teams as well.

As a Senior Manager in field Social Networks at CMD Group, LLC, I've used HootSuite for almost 10 years. It used to be the main scheduler that I used, but then it started crashing all the time. The bad part was that whenever it crashed, I lost all of the posts that were scheduled but not yet published. It cost me so much time to redo, that I switched to a competitor. 

I like Hootsuite because the dashboard allowed me access to some good analytics, and I can respond to different platforms from one dashboard. But the competitor software that I use also provides that.

I’ve been using Hootsuite for over a decade. I use it more to organize the social media work of my page - THGM (mostly Twitter) than to automate. I generally find outbound automation dangerous, as tempting as it can be. The best feature for me is being able to see multiple streams at once. I like to see my own tweets, my mentions and what’s been retweeted all at once. It saves me time on the inbound aspect of social media, which I don’t mind automating. While you can see your mentions on Twitter directly, you can’t see where they came from. Hootsuite shows me this, which is another aspect I like. I really like the new composer, which has been up and running just a few months now. It lets me easily send to more than one platform at once (although I rarely do this, as I tend to customize messages for different platforms). And it’s easy to add emojis, something that most businesses, including mine, do far too little of. I also like having the choice of uploading and drag-and-drop.

Pros: Hootsuite is a seamless scheduling tool I have used for managing multiple social media accounts at one time for my business - MyFoodSubscriptions. You can schedule posts ahead of time and focus on other tasks without worrying about any timing hassles throughout the week, and this allows for better overall management and account integration. It's a great tool for businesses of all sizes to utilize, be it smaller startups or large corporations. There are generous free features and paid options that are more reasonably priced in comparison to competitors. Unless you're in a niche market (i.e. content/B2B), I can't find a reason why you'd opt for a different social media management/scheduling tool. In my experience, it allows for higher levels of productivity and you can prioritize other tasks with ease by using it. 

Cons: The only con I can think of is there are other competitors on the market that offer real-time social media monitoring in foreign languages, and some tools of similar nature may be more attractive to niche marketing fields like B2B or content marketing. But for general digital marketing and social media management, Hootsuite is one of the best tools I have used to date and I would definitely recommend it in comparison to competitors.

Experience of using Hootsuite:

I have been using Hootsuite for about five years now for my company - Rosey Social and it has become a mainstay in managing social media for my clients. I mainly use it for Instagram scheduling because it was one of the first scheduling platforms to allow direct publishing to Instagram. At the time, there were many apps that would merely send you a notification when it was time to post, but not actually publish it for you.

Pros: 

- Direct publishing to Instagram

- Notifications when an account gets disconnected so you don't miss any scheduled posts

- Newest update allows you to see what the post will look like on each individual platform

- Supports many different social networks

- There is still a free plan for those just getting started

Cons: 

- Only allows one photo to be uploaded to Instagram at a time. (Even if you upload several photos when scheduling, it will only post the first one.)

- It's expensive for small businesses or smaller agency owners

- It can be difficult to learn how to use 

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with Hootsuite. When I've had problems in the past, their customer service team was very responsive and helpful. I know there are many Hootsuite haters out there, but Hootsuite has been in the social media game for a long time and they're not going anywhere.

I'm a huge fan of Hootsuite. As a Founder of Lead Peep, I love how it centralizes and streamlines all of your social media accounts, saving a lot of time and money. The scheduling is awesome, as is the ability to monitor engagement and brand sentiment. Those features alone make it worth every penny, but then you also have boosting, curation, analytics and hundreds of integrations with other powerful platforms.