Hootsuite is a social media management platform for building brand awareness, engaging with customers, and driving business results. Users can schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube ), manage organic and paid social content together, keep track of customer conversations, integrate with over 200+ applications, and gain actionable real-time insights from social media to make critical business decisions from…
$1,188
per year 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Rival IQ
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Rival IQ in Seattle delivers social media analytics and competitive insights to help digital marketers make informed decisions, improve results, and better understand competitors. Using benchmarks and comparative analysis, Rival IQ's technology is designed to enable digital marketers to uncover new opportunities, identify trends, and track results across all the main social channels and the web.
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Pricing
Hootsuite
Rival IQ
Editions & Modules
Professional
$99
per month (billed annually) 1 User, 10 Social accounts
Team
$249
per month (billed annually) 3 Users, 20 Social accounts
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.
I think it's a great tool to be used by any brand. The interface is user friendly, creating a safe space for account managers and social media managers alike. The only instance in where it wouldn't be optimal is if you're looking at very historical data, or tracking additional influencers (not competitors) or if you have multiple profiles (within 1 channel) to track.. But this suits our needs very well.
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.
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.
Managing companies within your installation aren't always easy. You can map companies to landscapes, but if you run out of slots for companies (based on your subscription tier) you end up having to swap companies frequently to get the reporting you need.
RivalIQ is competitively priced on a tiered structure, but if you want to add small sets of additional data within tiers, such as additional companies, the pricing is prohibitive as to force you into the next tier up.
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.
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
Support is continuous and very helpful. Email, phone, and chat support are always on and someone is always there to help. Your CSR will contact you quarterly to take your temperature and offer assistance or training, if necessary. Feature requests are taken seriously. They share their product development roadmap, which is a major plus.
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 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!
I demoed this platform as an alternative to Rival IQ and it has some of the similar features but the cost is much higher so it wasn't in our budget. If I had the choice, I might choose Falcon over Rival IQ because the visuals are much better than they are in Rival IQ.
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.