GroupTweet (discontinued) vs. Hootsuite

GroupTweet will work well for any brand that needs to extend their message through advocates authorized by GroupTweet. Our media company, The Breaking News Network, is the largest hyperlocal media network devoted to social good, and unique in providing a way for any community newsmaker to get their word out through our city feeds. Over 4,000 Twitter feeds - for example, city politicians, civic groups, nonprofits and performing arts organizations - are authorized to share content on our 400 city feeds.

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

• Since Twitter is a vehicle for breaking news, our correspondents in each of our 400 cities uses a simple hashtag to syndicate their local news and events. It is simple to use and correspondents don't have to do anything differently to share their messages across our city feeds.
• We can mobilize our correspondents to collectively promote news and events that impact the public good. For example, we can develop advocate networks to support initiatives like crowdfunding campaigns

• 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

• GroupTweet would be awesome if the service for collaboratively distributing info extended to Facebook, G+ and other social networks. However, that's probably something out of their control to develop.

• One thing that's frustrating is when trying to change the date/time and having to go into each individual post to update it is a lot. With other calendar tools, you are able to drag and drop the post in the time you want it OR there is a pop up that allows you to change the date/time without having to go into editing the actual post.
• It would be nice to have different calendar tabs for different brands. Instead of seeing all the brands scheduled posts on one calendar.
• There needs to be a content library to house all the creative files so it's easier to choose and upload.

Incentivized

GroupTweet is simply the best way to syndicate messages across Twitter. It takes time to build the foundation of authorized users, but once the user base understood the power we provided to get their message out, it has become institutionally utilized.

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 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

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.

There is no other product like GroupTweet! It is simple and takes no extra resources to use it, just add a hashtag. We are unusual in that we use GroupTweet for over 400 Twitter accounts. It would also work well for single accounts with a number of collaborative users.

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

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

Incentivized

• Since The Breaking News Network is noncommercial, we use GroupTweet to extend our facility to support the community by functioning as Twitter based bulletin boards. By offering a free and valuable service to the community instead of a pushy sales person trying to sell advertising, we create a lot of good will.
• In the future, we will use GroupTweet to get advocate networks to support crowdfunding initiatives we bring forward with our new crowdfunding marketing company, BNN Funding. For more information on how we develop massive advocate networks, BNNFunding.com

• We're a small marketing team in our company so having hootsuite is a life saver, I'm spending less time posting content as I can do my plan in advance and then schedule it out over the month/months so I can get back to helping the team with the other work we deal with.