Hootsuite vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued)

Hootsuite is well-suited for agencies managing multiple clients or scheduling multiple posts regularly across different channels. It's also appropriate for companies where the review process isn't streamlined or well-defined. But it's not well-suited for small brands that aren't regular on social media or for brands that focus heavily on real-time or trend-driven content, like TikTok or Twitter.

Incentivized

If you're tasked with publishing content to social on behalf of your organization then this tool is certainly worth considering. You have quick and easy capability to schedule across multiple platforms with drag-and-drop simplicity. It ties into Salesforce's real strength of its CRM platform so you can quickly tie social activity and leads to those already in your database. And it does a good job at monitoring and analyzing brand and competitor content across multiple media types. Having said that, if you're into deep-dive and full functionality SaaS tools then this might not be for you as it covers three areas adequately, but not in enough detail or strength to make it a star performer

Incentivized

• 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

• The amount of the information that radian6 can pull from multiple social platforms is absolutely phenomenal. Its just not only the pull but the way the information can be presented in dashboards was way good. It helped us understand in various aspects of our social presence.
• Multiple profiles helped us to break down the Big/Huge social buzz cloud to smaller and more manageable pieces. This helped us concentrate on the lows and helped us to plan better on turning them to highs.
• Radian6 allowed us to follow thru the crowd trends with the latest information presented in a single view. This also helped us to collect the social opinion on the product releases.
• The ease of use, one need not be an expert to start using this platform. The interface is easily understandable by anyone.
• A keyword can be edited quickly to tailor the needs and the results were quick.

Incentivized

• 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

• Instagram Social Listening - it currently does not offer much social listening in terms of Instagram.
• Instagram Owned - It currently stops pulling once an update is "old" by their standards, even if it receives recent comments. They can force pull, but you have to work with their tech team to do so.

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

I spent a lot of time researching the right platform for me and our organisation (thanks to the other reviews on TrustRadius also). Having used other platforms when I found frustrations getting my everyday work done, I knew exactly what I wanted and this is why I chose Social Studio. While there have been a few hiccups, the quarterly update releases and the outstanding tech support have kept me more than happy.

Hootsuite is straightforward and does a great job of onboarding new users directly within the platform. Connecting social media accounts, regardless of whether you are managing multiple profiles on one platform, is easy enough. You can also easily toggle between platforms to see interactive dashboards showing how people are engaging with your posts.

Incentivized

• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.

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!)

The platform is rarely down

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.

No issues with performance.

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

As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.

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.

• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.

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

Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.

Metricool is free and we can shedule up to 50 posts per month, however Hootsuite allows us to do just a little bit more. For the price Agorapulse and Hootsuite are in tight competition but we prefer the Hootsuite format, although some chamber partners do find it a bit on the older school side we do not. We like the Hootsuite system

Compared to Radian6, I found Meltwater Buzz, Simply Measured, and Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Meltwater Buzz and Radian6 are very similar products with many of the same functionalities but Buzz presents your analytics in a way that is much easier to understand. I did a two week trial with Sprout Social and absolutely loved the product but our company needed the capability to connect to Salesforce, which is available on R6 and Buzz. Simply Measured is my all time favorite but I have only used the free version so I am not completely sure how it stacks up to Radian6

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

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

• Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
• Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
• If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.

Incentivized