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…
$149
per month Starts at 1 user, 5 social accounts
SOCi
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SOCi, including the former Brandify (acquired July 2021) presents a range of local marketing solutions, such as store locators, local SEO driven landing pages, local advertising, and brand reputation management.
N/A
Pricing
Hootsuite
SOCi
Editions & Modules
Standard
$99
per month (billed annually) Starts at 1 user, 5 social accounts
Advanced
$249
per month (billed annually) Starts at 1 user, unlimited social accounts
Enterprise
Custom Pricing
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Hootsuite
SOCi
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Plans can be paid monthly or annually, with a discount for annual pricing.
I used the basic Hootsuite subscription to schedule organic social media posts. However, it fell short in assisting franchises or businesses with multiple locations because it lacks the ability to localize content. So, you would essentially have to create 50 posts for 50 …
Hootsuite is best suited for organizations with less team members & loads of work to be done. The scheduling comes handy with such tools as it takes a lot of bandwidth of a person when posts have to be posted manually. It is less appropriate if a team member has bandwidth for daily posting.
SOCi is a fantastic tool for a franchise business because it provides the ability to post in bulk while also posting localized content. So, you can share the same basic content across all of your locations, but SOCi's tagging system inserts a location's phone number or website for each individual location. This helps create a localized feel and personalized touch -- but you only schedule one post, making it easy and efficient to localize content in mass posting. This principle applies to paid ads as well. Because of these features, SOCi may not be the best platform for companies with just one location
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.
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.
Hootsuite is a powerful and versatile social media management platform that streamlines scheduling, engagement, and analytics. However, there is room for improvement in user interface intuitiveness, pricing accessibility, and advanced analytics customization. Enhancing these aspects could further elevate its value and overall user experience.
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
We have not had to contact support so there is nothing to say in response to this question. We are sure that if we needed to contact them we would be able to get any issues resolved quickly
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.
With Meta Business Manager, you are limited to posting on Facebook and Instagram. Whereas with Hootsuite, you do not have these limitations and can post beyond these two platforms. I do enjoy using Meta Business Manager. It has some of the same features as Hootsuite and there's no cost in using their social posting features. They also provide analytics as well. But since they are limited platform-wise on where you can post we kept Hootsuite.
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.
