Hootsuite vs. Viralheat (Discontinued)

I really like that I can just go into hootsuite, connect all the our social channels and be able to have a great overview on what our social feeds look like. It's super handy not having to spend time going into each social platform to do the same post, and I can spend one day scheduling out that month's social plan. I much prefer sorting out boosting post from Hootsuite, the only downside is that they have a limit to what you can boost a month so a lot of the time I have to grin and bear it and use Meta Business Suite instead for boosting posts.

If social is a big part of your business in more departments than just marketing and communications (marcom), make sure to let the team know and ask how Viralheat can accommodate multiple users and departments. Viralheat was great during the evaluation process because they were willing to show us exactly what they could do for our company - they even customized accounts for us to show us the true value of signing on.

• 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

• Viralheat’s reporting feature delivers analytics in presentation-grade spreadsheets. I include these images in reports or presentations to different teams.
• Monitoring is definitely a strong point. I am not limited by a conversation or mention limitation, which is especially important when tracking high-volume products or brands. We are able to quickly identify trends and act accordingly.
• The user experience is a pleasant one. Viralheat offers many comprehensive features but the layout of the product is simple and intuitive. I’m able to access any feature without having to click around into multiple places.

• Because of the way algorithms works, we would have loved to be able to automate making a post with no link and posting the first comment with a link (hello LinkedIn)
• We would have loved an easy way to post from a main account and repost the post for other accounts we administrate, for instance a corporate post reposted by individuals for LinkedIn, or retweets from one main account by child accounts

Incentivized

• Not being able to reference in the native platform (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook) the name of companies or users referenced in a post.
• Not being able to embed images natively. (e.g. Image attached to a post on Viralheat shows up as a url link on the native platform).
• Would love to see a calendar view of the scheduled posts as well as the current list view.

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

Viralheat provided our team with the kind of monitoring tool we were looking for. As an added bonus, they had a member of their team brainstorm the best ways for us to set up our account to ensure we weren’t missing anything. Great customer service.

Hootsuite is probably the easiest to use social media scheduler of all the ones that I've used. It's been easy to teach clients how to use the software themselves and it can be accessed easily on anyone's phone through their mobile app. Highly recommend for anyone that wants a software that is easy to learn!

Incentivized

I found it really easy to use and I use it on a daily basis and can easily find my way around. It has the usability of a consumer application for an Enterprise product that does very complex things in a very elegant manner.

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

The customer success team clearly cares about how well we do. They are quick to get back to us and they always offer to jump on a screen share so we can understand and learn new features.

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.

We were up and running within an hour.

Hootsuite's free account was sufficient for use on behalf of our client. When they restructured their pricing model and eliminated free and affordable subscriptions suitable for a small business, we found that Zoho Social was an excellent replacement. The interface was simpler and the pricing was affordable and suitable for a small business.

Incentivized

We chose Viralheat because it allowed us to do multiple things from one tool. We were able to monitor our brand mentions after each video, song, or album release - this provided us with valuable feedback abouout our brand and music. We were also able to connect our accounts and engage directly with our fans as well as post new content. We monitored the analytics around each release and campaign and were able to determine which were successful.

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

Incentivized

• I have been able to evaluate which posts, in general, do well and figure out what types of posts to make (content)
• It's been harder however to compare on social medial platform compared to another because it's hard to duplicate a post with a new owly (I think you used to be able to) but more so, you also can't assign it a custom owly link so I can see at a glance which owly link was associated with what platform.

Incentivized

• Viralheat has helped me understand how real-life users react to things I build and/or test.
• I’ve gotten a better understanding of my space and the relevant news surrounding it. This helps me build a better product.
• It saves me a lot of time. I’m able to quickly monitor what’s important to me.