Hootsuite App Review: Features, Pricing, and Alternatives
Having a steady flow of engaging content for your business is half the battle with great content marketing; the other half of it is actually posting that content regularly, interacting with your social audiences, and measuring the impact of what you're doing.
Enter social media management tools.
Social media management tools save you time by allowing you to create, edit, and schedule social media posts like short text posts, blog articles, interesting links, images and videos, and even audio content. Hootsuite is one such tool, and it is undoubtedly a leading player in the social media management tool space.
In this comprehensive Hootsuite app review, we look at some of the key benefits and features of this popular tool and highlight some alternative solutions if it's ultimately not quite right for you:
- What to Consider Before You Purchase Social Media Management Software
- What is Hootsuite?
- Hootsuite App Features and Benefits
- Hootsuite App User Reviews
- Hootsuite App Pricing
- Alternatives to the Hootsuite App
What to Consider Before You Purchase Social Media Management Software
Social media management tools seem like they have everything you need. And they probably do. The problem is that they probably have a long list of things you don't need as well. The result? You end up with a confusing tactical mindset and you forget about the strategy you wanted to implement in the first place.
Before you subscribe to a social media management software subscription, consider what you want to achieve with your marketing. Are you seeking to raise awareness of your brand, or particular aspects of it? Are you hoping to sign up new email list subscribers? Are you trying to sell more products?
Whatever your goal, you need a social media strategy that fits. And once you have identified that strategy, you can move on to selecting a tool that meets the tactical requirements of that strategy. For example, if you are looking for rapid follower growth and high levels of audience interaction, you will need to post a lot of content throughout the day, and you need to find a tool that allows you to queue many posts at once without imposing limits on the number of scheduled posts you have in your social media content calendar.
Work on your strategy and write a list of the features you'll need your social media management tool to have before you make that purchase. With many tools costing tens or even hundreds of dollars a month, you'll thank yourself for making a slow decision on this one!
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to create and schedule social media content across multiple networks and accounts, and to review that content's performance. With Hootsuite, you can:
- Schedule your own content or share someone else's
- Manage your interactions (likes, comments, and direct messages, for example) in one place
- Stay on top of trending content elsewhere on the web
- Promote your content via paid ads, and
- Measure the impact of all your hard work
… all on a single platform.
The core value proposition of Hootsuite is that it saves you time. One way it does this is by allowing you to connect multiple social media accounts to one Hootsuite dashboard, including:
- YouTube
Helpfully, Hootsuite also publishes a bank of resources for small business owners, which aims to make your social media marketing easier and more effective.
Hootsuite App Features and Benefits
The main Hootsuite features center on five actions that are critical to social media marketing success:
Publish
Hootsuite's goal with its Publish feature is to simplify "the process of planning, composing, and publishing engaging on-brand content." Central to this feature is the Planner, which looks like a calendar where all your drafts and scheduled posts are laid out by the intended date and time of posting, making it easier for you to see what, when, and where posts get published. Once a post is scheduled, you can drag it around to other days or times as you see fit, without having to remake the whole post. Also of great value is the preview tool, which allows you to see exactly what your post, images, videos, links, hashtags, and other assets will look like when you post it to a certain platform. Built-in character limits mean you never have to worry about being cut off in the real-life post.
Engage
With its Engage feature, Hootsuite aims to help you "deliver efficient and personalized customer care through social media." In practice, this translates to a suite of tools that enable you to interact with your audience. When you get interaction on a post (such as a like or a retweet), you can respond to that straight away, either by directly responding to the person who engaged with your content or by sharing the interaction with colleagues (if you are collecting customer feedback or doing sentiment research, for example). You can also respond to all incoming messages in one place, which is immensely helpful when you manage multiple accounts across several platforms.
Monitor
The Monitor feature is imperative for marketing managers looking for data on their investments. This feature helps you review key topics, track your post-performance, and even monitor your competitors' posts. You can get key data on your posts, clicks, mentions, likes, and more through an intuitive dashboard. You can also integrate social listening tools to know what kind of content is hot and how you can take part in the conversation.
Advertise
It is disheartening when you spend time and money making amazing content, and then very few people see it organically. Helpfully, Hootsuite's Advertise feature allows you to boost the visibility of your content across platforms through the Hootsuite app itself, which means you don't need to keep going off-platform to manage your spend or see the impact of your investment.
Analyze
Finally, the Analyze feature brings everything together, either proving that you're doing things right or showing you where you are going wrong. You can set targets and benchmarks for performance and analyze your efforts and engagement over time, which is critical if you are paying close attention to marketing spending. Hootsuite even has an Impact calculator, helping you to determine the ROI of your efforts.
Hootsuite App User Reviews
Hootsuite app reviews are plentiful online, and that's not surprising given Hootsuite has over 18 million users. Here are some of the great things they're saying:
- "Very easy to organize your social media campaign(s) using various SM sites. For my tastes, I especially like the calendar-based content planner; it truly helps me stay organized when I have a lot on my plate."
- "Being able to see all of my feeds on one page makes life so much easier."
- "For our business, connecting and interacting with prospective clients on Hootsuite is crucial for success."
As for improvements, users say:
- ?I would like to be able to search all my previous posts for keywords. Some posts I need to resend or repurpose and I have copied them out of Hootsuite to a spreadsheet with the content and image and which social platform it was on. It would be good to have this exported as the posts are deleted when reaching 12months old."
- "I'd have to say the cost is the biggest drawback for me. The free tier used to allow slightly more channels to post to, but they reduced that number, forcing me to either upgrade or choose another product."
- "I wish there were more options available such as being able to post carousel posts on Facebook or being able to tag people, products or other pages, etc."
Hootsuite App Pricing
It's not surprising to see pricing come up in a negative review on Hootsuite, as it is one of the more expensive tools for what it offers.
There is a free tier, but paid pricing starts at $49 USD per month for one user, and goes all the way up to $599 USD per month for over five users, with enterprise plans available for custom needs.
Alternatives to the Hootsuite App
Social media management tools are abundant nowadays, with single and multi-platform offerings in increasing competition with one another. Here are some alternatives to look at:
- Loomly — best for solos and small teams
- Sprout Social — best for bigger teams with more complex needs
- Buffer — best for startups and young companies
- Sendible — best for agencies
- CoSchedule — best for blog content
How Scripted Can Help!
If writing and editing content, finding stock images, and creating social posts sounds like too much of a headache and you'd rather have ready-made content to schedule to your Hootsuite account, consider Scripted. We offer countless writers to create content for your business's needs.
Published by Ciara Antolini on Tuesday, February 15, 2022 in Marketing Agencies, Tool Review, Tools, Tools Reviews.
