Ambassify vs. Hootsuite vs. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Ambassify is a great way to inform colleagues about comms on social media. It’s very easy for people to share/engage with posts. The platform is convenient and requires low effort. It’s great to be able to use one platform for a variety of campaigns to keep colleagues engaged. This is a great tool.

Incentivized

Hootsuite is a great starter tool for companies that want to use a scheduling service for their social media content. It allows access to nearly all of the commonly used social media platforms, so no matter where you share content, Hootsuite will allow you to do it with ease.

Incentivized

It's a good fit for our recruiters because they are always looking for good info about our organization to share. It's a small but engaged group that takes advantage of having a niche topic and team. It also works well for huge company news, such as winning an award. Items that all employees know about and a large percentage of them are excited about perform best. Niche topics that are only relevant to one or a few small teams don't perform as well because employees not involved in that work are less likely to share.

Incentivized

• Enabling the creation of a platform that can reward employees for going the extra mile and help to spread the word about the company
• How the platform has almost been "gamified"
• Just keeps employees up to date on all of the things going on in the company from a marketing perspective - such as new web pages/social posts, meaning they can engage with this content and help promote

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Scheduling out content / shares for the week
• Providing a quick glance leaderboard of top content shares across departments
• Easy to learn and leverage user interface (UI)

Incentivized

• We have had issues trying to link Ambassify to WhatsApp
• I think that it would be nice to schedule posts and notifications
• There has been times where there is a slight delay on the notifications.

Incentivized

• Because of the way algorithms works, we would have loved to be able to automate making a post with no link and posting the first comment with a link (hello LinkedIn)
• We would have loved an easy way to post from a main account and repost the post for other accounts we administrate, for instance a corporate post reposted by individuals for LinkedIn, or retweets from one main account by child accounts

Incentivized

• Sprout to Bambu integration is not what was depicted in trial and is not used because of this
• Missing functionality: LinkedIn tagging
• Missing functionality: posting videos
• Missing functionality: posting something without a link. Example: picture from an event or community outreach

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The program has given some early wins, and there are very active employees who have truly integrated sharing from Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social into their regular social media activity. It would be a huge lift to migrate people to a different platform. While we'd love to grow our program, there's already enough value to justify keeping an employee advocacy program.

Incentivized

The overall usability is awesome, the scheduling, reporting, etc. The spellcheck and feature that used to be a part of it was awesome and we are sad to see that it was taken away. However, we do like the AI feature and emoji customization. The new ad and paid media element is something we are starting to explore, especially for Facebook and Linkedin

It's fairly user friendly when it's working correctly. There are more instances of bugs and glitches compared to other tools, including Sprout Social's primary platform. There's also an exception for Facebook personal profiles where that is more clunky to share on compared to LinkedIn, X or even Facebook Business Pages. I'd also like more customization around photo formats/sizes and email templates. Despite those negatives, the end user can share quickly and easily, which is vital to sustaining user participation. Facebook can be clunky, but most of our employees share on LinkedIn, which is quick, easy and smooth.

Incentivized

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

Very easy to teach and learn

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.

Microsoft Yammer is also a great tool, but it doesn't have many integration possibilities like Ambassify do. It also lacks that casual touch that is characteristic of Amabassify. Another important factor in this kind of tool is the user interface, it needs to be extremely friendly and intuitive to guarantee its continuous uses, and that's Ambassify's key.

Incentivized

Hootsuite is definitely the most cost effective of the bunch for the goals that my clients have. The AI caption generation is also perfect for cutting down on time. Caption creation actually takes up a lot of time in the scheduling process for content and this feature made Hootsuite stand out to me!

Incentivized

It was similar in that it helped us push prewritten messages out to our team, but the UX/UI was far more dated and not as intuitive. It's mobile app also wasn't very useful; made it difficult to edit messages and would constantly need you to log back in. The two things GaggleAMP had over Bambu however was more comprehensive analytics and the ability to automatically push out social posts

Incentivized

We are only using in marketing and have been able to scale.

Incentivized

• The social sharing of our posts (and therefore and engagement metrics on those profiles) has generated more website traffic
• The first time I used this for a previous company (during a PR crisis) it really did help bring the team together

Incentivized

• I have been able to evaluate which posts, in general, do well and figure out what types of posts to make (content)
• It's been harder however to compare on social medial platform compared to another because it's hard to duplicate a post with a new owly (I think you used to be able to) but more so, you also can't assign it a custom owly link so I can see at a glance which owly link was associated with what platform.

Incentivized

• Positive returns -- sharing our brand and enabling our employees to share and tell their stories, ultimately helping them reach their own goals.

Incentivized