Hootsuite

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

My department is currently in the process of shopping social scheduling/monitoring/reporting tools (i.e. Buffer, Sprout, Hubspot, etc.), and Hootsuite is one that I was assigned to test. The feature I enjoyed best was definitely the feeds setup. Unlike other providers I've used, Hootsuite allows you to set up different feeds (i.e. mentions, hashtags, etc.). This allows me to monitor all platforms and mentions, and even keep tabs on things like certain keywords I can respond quickly. For instance, I manage the social presence for a popular sporting goods company, and I can search for FAQs on Twitter and quickly provide an answer and a link, all while responding to different DMs across our other social platforms. On Sprout Social, everything was aggregated into one feed. I prefer to have it parsed out so I can know how to modify my answers quickly depending on the platform. I also really liked the reporting options - the reporting templates are set up so the bulk of the numbers are at the beginning, rather than below the fold, which has been great for clients with short attention spans.

Inconvénients

The UI seems a bit dated. The features themselves are great, so it truly doesn't matter, but it's just not as modern and beautiful as other platforms. I don't think it's changed much, looks-wise, since when I last used it in a previous role 5+ years ago. It has no effect on actual usability, but an update would make it feel less clunky and more intuitive.

Avantages

As someone who uses Hootsuite's "Free" plan, I'm incredibly impressed by what Hootsuite offers in the plan. My favorite tool on Hootsuite is the "Streams." I can sort scheduled posts, past posts, mentions, and followers' posts by social media platform using "Streams" on my dashboard. This allows me to see responses or comments on my posts and engage with followers, without having to visit several social media sites. With the free version, I can also schedule more posts on social media than other social media management programs, and the free plan allows me to schedule posts on my business Instagram account.

Inconvénients

"Free plan" users who are needing advanced features beyond basic analytics will need to upgrade and if they shorten links using TinyUrl or Bitly, there isn't a meaningful way to track engagement in the program. Also, users need to be aware that the connections between Hootsuite and social media networks frequently drop, and that the program's connection with Instagram is frequently buggy.

Avantages

I run a modeling and acting agency and I was posting between SC, IG, FB, Twitter and YT on a daily basis. Making it very hard to be away from my phone and risk missing prime posting opportunities and viral trends. I was looking for something that would schedule pre-selected posts, videos, pictures and adds. The best option online seemed to be Hootsuite. It was well marketed and seemed very user-friendly... at first.
It does indeed schedule your posts to various social media platforms, and it also allows for multiple streams of social media (i.e other business or personal accounts). That's a very handy feature!

Inconvénients

The user interface is weak, it's not user-friendly nor is it practical or modern looking. It has a tendency to leg, it also isn't mobile friendly, they do have an app, but again it's not easy to navigate. Which is an absolute must when working on social media on the fly. When I created beautiful well-round posts and saved them to a posting schedule. I would check the posts after they had been released, via the online social media site, the posts would always turn out unformatted, with broken links and fuzzy low res images. I was overall very disappointed with this product. especially because it was so highly rated and not free. I felt like I kept putting in a lot of effort just to re-do all my work all the time.

Avantages

I started using HootSuite at the very EARLY stages of my business. Before I even had a single client. The reason I chose HootSuite is because they had a FREE version... and in my early client-less stage...I needed all the free I could get. It's extremely easy to add whichever social networks you have (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) The free version allows for 3 profiles, but once you upgrade to the paid you can of course add more. The platform itself is very self explanatory and makes scheduling future posts extremely easy.

Inconvénients

I'd like to be able to edit the posts by platform. For example, when posting to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter -- I'd like to add hashtags just to the Instagram Caption and/or shorten the Twitter caption. Instead of having to create a post for each separate platform, I'd like to be able to do it all in one and make the edits in the same batch.