Wildfire Interactive (Discontinued) vs. Hootsuite vs. Writecream

The transition to Google has been painful - key contacts are no longer available.

Hootsuite presents my team everything we need to manage the social media function. Even writing the "what can be improved" section strained me, because there really isn't a whole lot to complain about. At this point, I (and my social media manager) need to explore the platform more, specifically OwlyGPT, campaigns, and listening. It's pretty much everything we need right now

Incentivized

• Facebook tab implementation. Allows you to easily create and produce functioning social tabs on your brands FB page.
• Add voting, sweepstakes, poll functionality to your website. Easily implement these campaigns to increase user engagement and TOS.

• Reporting. We are able to pull accurate and concise data points on our channels.
• Planning and calendaring. We love that we are able to have our teams plan out content across months so that we are never feeling behind schedule on getting content out there.
• Creating content natively in the platform!

Incentivized

• More customization - Would like to have the ability to edit more without coding.

• TikTok is an area for improvement as it's newer to Hootsuite. It would be beneficial to be able to link non-business profiles on TikTok to Hootsuite as many businesses use personal accounts to access TikTok's expansive music library.
• Hootsuite does have room to improve the analytics capabilities. There could be more ways to customize each aspect of their reports. There isn't much manipulation of data in each type of data set.
• Simplicity is an area of improvement for Hootsuite. The streams are one example of an area that is super cluttered and difficult to view. Their platform could really use an aesthetic overhaul to make things look more pleasing.

Incentivized

Our initial contract with Wildfire Whitelabel was for $30,000/year, as we progressed we found several alternatives for significantly less. We used this to our advantage to lower the second year to $17,000 with the limitation in the level of support (they call this their "core" subscription). Support has been quite bad.

During our contract, we also asked for quotes on some custom work, but never managed to get an answer (or actual quote). Now two years into our contract, the limitations and lack of development are enough for us to find a different solution. Newcomers to the market like Rafflecopter, WooBox and PunchTab are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price

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

Very easy to use, almost anyone can learn how to build a comprehensive promotion.

I will give Hootsuite a rating of 10/10 because it has delivered measurable business impact through social media. It helps centralize and streamline content planning, approvals, scheduling, and reporting in one place. It has significantly reduced manual workload and improved team efficiency. We achieved higher engagement rates, faster customer response times, and improved lead quality through social channels. It has also helped us with centralized reporting across different social media channels.

Incentivized

I have never been kicked out of Wildfire service. Always up and running.

Gliches have made it a bit of a bind, particularly when you just want to 'click and send' a web article after you have read it - and then you have to deal with support (a great team but not always able to solve the problems with the gliches). Gliches with it loading properly, gliches with 'double ups in FB on the posts (the personal page and the business page if both clicked will lead to 2 lots of postings to each page!)

Easy to perform tasks and quick to upload changes to your promotions.

HootSuite does everything it is designed to do very well: the product's performance is very reliable and efficient. Like other tools, there is always a room for new developments and updates, and the HootSuite team recognizes this and focuses on new development as well.

Phone and email support were always available to us when we needed it.

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

Gave me a thorough rundown on everything the software does. Sometimes it is difficult to run through it all over the phone/internet, but I was able to figure it out myself.

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.

Simple to use and very effective in increasing user engagement on both social channels and website. Noticeably helped raise TOS.

Simple and easy to use, and have never had any issues. We like how it saves me time and allows me to plan in advance. I plan on using this for as long as I can and will encourage others to use it too. If you haven't tried it you should. I hope my review is helpful to everyone.

Incentivized

Wildfire was a merely an adequate social media tool when it existed as a standalone, but it just couldn't compete against other players like Sprout, Falcon, and Sprinklr.

Incentivized

Hootsuite offers a wide range of tools at a somewhat steeper cost. If you manage multiple platforms and want to survey the content being shared and interacted with across all of them, Hootsuite seems to have an easier platform to do that with. HubSpot CRM allows us to integrate our social platforms into our existing CRM, which is a cost saver, but Hootsuite is social media-focused, so the set-up is easier.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• As with any social media management tool, there is a savings on labor hours (rather than doing the manual work)
• Aggregating all content into one system creates efficiencies for content teams

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized