Hootsuite is a social media management platform for building brand awareness, engaging with customers, and driving business results. Users can schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube ), manage organic and paid social content together, keep track of customer conversations, integrate with over 200+ applications, and gain actionable real-time insights from social media to make critical business decisions from…
$1,188
per year 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Shoutlet (Discontinued)
Score 2.0 out of 10
N/A
Shoutlet is a cloud-based social relationship platform that enables marketers to publish, engage and measure social marketing campaigns and activities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google+, and YouTube.
The product’s focus is on quantifying return on social, integrating social data into business and scaling social across the enterprise. Features include tools for social CRM, creative design, social listening, ads, workflow management, contest design…
N/A
Pricing
Hootsuite
Shoutlet (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Professional
$99
per month (billed annually) 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Team
$249
per month (billed annually) 3 Users, 20 Social accounts
Sprout Social, Shoutlet, Sendible, others. We liked Hootsuite's flat-fee approach, and the fact that it was the most popular and most widely used platform at the time (and probably still is).
Prior to Shoutlet, we used Hootsuite Pro, and we still actually use it on occasion. Hootsuite has a great product but we found that Shoutlet offered a more robust, valuable product that helped us meet our needs better. We also explored Offerpop, but again, we found that …
Shoutlet looks and works head and shoulders above Hootsuite (particularly the free version). With great customer support, clean user interfaces, an easily accessible calendar, incredible tracking options and the versatile contests feature I truly feel all of our social media …
Hootsuite is a great tool and we prefer it to some of the others out there. The only negative is the price point and the fact that it keeps going up with no regard to the small non-profits that have been using it for years. After mentioning that the system is great and the fact that we can integrate and customize the posting for each social media site without having to be jumping from one system to the other makes it ideal for a small team doing multiple projects or things at the same time.
I think Shoutlet is an excellent tool for any mid-sized to larger company looking to improve their social strategy. While it does have some minor improvements that can be made, it's overall an impressive way to mass post to multiple networks and interact and engage with your followers in the social space. I feel at this time that a smaller company could probably benefit from a lesser in-depth version of this tool at this time
Scheduling of content. The ease of use for Hootsuite's planner abilities is top of the industry. It is simple and effective in posting content to different channels and accounts.
Analytics are superior on Hootsuite. Their custom reports allow you to view very specific KPI's that you can adjust for each channel or account. The reports are also exportable to be used for others in the company.
Inbox management. The inbox manager is superior to any in the industry. Hootsuite allows you to tag certain phrases or keywords to better filter messages based on importance or topic.
The ability to manage and publish to various social accounts from one platform. This feature helped us to have a cohesive social strategy and saved us a lot of time having to go back and forth between accounts.
The module that allowed us to build contests and custom landing pages was perhaps my favorite part. For the contests, it proved to be ultra convenient to be able to build, host and run social promotions through the same platform that housed our social accounts and lists. From a landing-page-design standpoint, it was also wonderful and time-effective for each individual department to be able to build professional and dynamic pages themselves rather than tasking it to our web designers who really didn't have the time.
I was also very pleased with the customer service we received from the Shoulet team. From the original demo, to the training sessions, all the way through to back-end service maintenance, everyone we dealt with was available, accommodating and friendly. Not entirely common in this day in age.
The ability to tag people or companies across all the social platforms (instagram and Linkedin)
If you're scheduling a post that is going out across all your social channels it would be good to be able to bulk move them if you have to post them on a new date instead of having to do it manually one by one
I would like to see Shoutlet improve the usability of their "Shoutlet Profiles" module. It has improved over time, but I would like to see more individual user metrics such as affinity, time spent engaged per user, and monthly interactions by user.
I would also like to see Shoutlet redesign their "manage urls" module and URL shortener. The shortener works well, but I would like the interface to be more user friendly, and be able to access it throughout the rest of the tool. Perhaps in a slide out drawer.
Unfortunately, Shoutlet does not offer a Pin scheduling tool at this time. This would be a HUGE asset for them to have.
At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.
While I do not have direct control over the renewal of our contract, I am definitely lobbying to not only renew the contract, but expand our contract with Shoutlet to include more of our company's accounts in our Shoutlet account for the many reasons already stated. By pulling all of our accounts, pages and platforms into one media management tool, we'll be able to better serve our fans, members, patients and employees. It will cut down time it takes for us to post across our entire company's breadth of social media options while sharing more easily between locations and entities. For medium and large scale enterprises, Shoutlet is hard to beat.
Hootsuite is probably the easiest to use social media scheduler of all the ones that I've used. It's been easy to teach clients how to use the software themselves and it can be accessed easily on anyone's phone through their mobile app. Highly recommend for anyone that wants a software that is easy to learn!
While some things do require a little training, a quick phone training session or reading an online guide usually suffices. I've never needed multiple training sessions for any part of Shoutlet. As someone with very little coding/programming background (read: absolutely none), I am always able to accomplish what is needed without feeling over my head or needing help.
Any outages are communicated in advance and have not been a problem. We let our clients know based on communications from HootSuite. Since we operate 24/7 with multiple shifts, planned outages can interfere with our operations, but we can always work around it.
Hootsuite makes passing on articles from the web very easy- when it works! I have had a number of gliches with Chrome where it does not open properly and the solution (after some toing and froing with support) was to uninstall and reinstall. The support staff are always very helpful (which is great!) but the gliches..... well, they suck when you are already busy!
I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing! The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help on this
I feel that the level of support I get from Shoutlet is far beyond the level of support I've received from other companies in a variety of services. It would be nice to have a regular update from Tech Therapy that lists out any potential bugs they're working to fix for the various browsers they support. Sometimes I wonder if I'm experiencing an issue simply because I use Firefox vs. Chrome.
The online training is decent; however, it takes a lot more time to search for answers to my questions. Having a training session with a live person was much more effective as they were able to quickly address the business needs I have.
• Combination of vendor and internal. The vendor bumped up our account to the Enterprise version (quite simple and easy) and then set up our organization and team structure. We then had to log in and set up team members and assign members to social media accounts. This was pretty easy to do as they have a great user interface. We simply had to drag and drop people into the correct team giving them access to specific social media accounts.
Hootsuite's free account was sufficient for use on behalf of our client. When they restructured their pricing model and eliminated free and affordable subscriptions suitable for a small business, we found that Zoho Social was an excellent replacement. The interface was simpler and the pricing was affordable and suitable for a small business.
Shoutlet is infinitely more advanced than SocialMadeSimple. It is a much more complex and in-depth platform. We actually changed to SocialMadeSimple after Shoutlet and I miss how easy to use and advanced it was in comparison. It was a money decision but if they were the same price, I would absolutely insist we go back
For our organization, all ROI was on time saved and efficiency: for creating posts, for scheduling and publishing, for interacting with users, and for analyzing performances. It all comes in one place and this makes a very huge difference in your workflows. We would say that Hootsuite went beyond our expectations on this front, for example with the dynamics UTMs and the media library. Saving time was the main reason why we wanted to purchase the platform and it did not disappoint at all.
The ROI in time was also fast to get. The learning curse is very short and this is also an important element. Benefiting from the platform did not take long to be experienced.
Allows our small staff to provide our clients with world-class service and data.
Exponentially improved fan base expansion for our clients.
Rapid response for customer service issues for clients - allowing us to help our clients prevent their social media presence from becoming the Complaint Department, rather a true community of fans and supporters of a brand.
