Hootsuite vs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing

As a nonprofit organization, we use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to share our purpose. Hootsuite allows us to schedule posts in advance, monitor engagement, and ensure consistent messaging across all platforms. Hootsuite’s content calendar is useful in planning and scheduling posts in advance, ensuring a steady flow of content without needing to post each day manually.

Incentivized

Appropriate if an organization is already using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement products like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service etc. Not appropriate for a big enterprise where has a separate marketing department, and the lead / contact for marketing information / marketing list can come through different applications in the organization, not just Microsoft Dynamics 365 Apps if they have one.

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

• Customer data management
• Lead management
• Campaign strategy design

Incentivized

• 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

• Microsoft does not provide HTML for forms. They provide a div that needs to authenticated and is a real pain in the [butt].
• They provide no canned unsubscribe button. Copying the code from a template doesn't work either, even though your code will pass testing when you build out an email.
• Overall the work marketing automation tool on the market. It's like they did no research into what users might want or what the competitors are offering.

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 wouldn't even think of renewing our use of Marketing 365. It's worthless

I love using Hootsuite and all of the benefits it provides. It has many strengths that help with social media posting and managing our accounts. However, I believe some of the weaknesses like limited paid ad management, analytics being a little basic compared to competitors, and not having access to all of the features (unless you pay for a Team and Enterprise account) played a role in my rating. Overall, Hootsuite is a great company.

Incentivized

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is extremely usable in order to manage all of my organization's customer information across the organization. Further we use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing to manage all of our marketing campaigns from beginning to end. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing makes my organization more able to run a professional marketing strategy.

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 reliable

Incentivized

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.

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

While the cost was significantly more than other vendors we looked at, the tools are similar to our previous tool so conversion would be (somewhat) easy. We chose it because it directly integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - which we integrated at the same time.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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.

• It has improved ROI for the organization replacing the old marketing tools being used earlier.
• Made the organization cloud ready earlier the organization was using on-Prem based solution.

Incentivized