Hootsuite vs. Visible Intelligence, discontinued

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.

Incentivized

The only time I have trouble recommending Visible is to my clients of specific markets. We work with several McDonald's co-ops and we can't narrow our searches to a specific region for example, to the state of Iowa or Kansas City region.

• 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

• The way the cloud of related terms, a.k.a "social media differentiating terms", was organized into a chart with the frequency of appearance was extremely helpful. Each term was also a link to other terms that may be related to your research as well, which was insightful.
• Visible Intelligence allows you to view the differentiating terms across platforms. This is particularly a useful tool when trying to compare and understand what is being said and where exactly (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
• Most of the social media analytical tools allow you to view "sample content". However, and I find this extremely useful in many cases, Visible Intelligence allows you to directly connect with the person that posted the content. Because of such feature more clarification can be accomplished.

• 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

• Firehose terms. I wish there was a place in setting or somewhere that let us know what firehose terms we currently have. To make it really great it would be nice for it to also show a history of what terms we had in the past with dates and the start dates of current firehose terms. I can't tell you how many times we've had to reach out to our rep to let us know what we currently have in place and when you have multiple users in the agency using the tool, it's near impossible to keep track of when changes were made.
• Exports, I wish there was a way to have larger exports. And if you can't, an easier way to break down larger exports. For example, say my timeframe is only 1 day and I have over 20,000 results in that day– there is no way for me to export all of those results by breaking it down because my only options are most recent, most relevant, klout, most confident, most influential, most followers, positive, negative. There's no option to break down 1 day by the first 20,000 then the second 20,000 and so on. Instead I have to then manually break it down by media type and hope each one of those is less than 20,000.
• Author influence, I know this algorithm is tricky but at the very least I think it could be better explained within the tool so when clients ask questions we can answer them. It could be nice to have some filtering options with this because several authors get a 99 score and it's not valuable information.
• Tagging, when tagging content it is extremely annoying that I can't add new tags in the "select tags" drop down. It takes too much time to go in to where I can add new tags and then go back to where I was.
• It'd also be nice to have setting for a stream where only a certain folder or folders of tags display. So when I'm in client x's search the only tags that display are client x's instead of all 5 clients and I have to keep scrolling through to find what I need.
• Archive, when you hit archive on a post it does nothing. It stays in your search and ends up in all you charts which skews your data. What I do now is I created an actual tag called "archive" (because if I didn't tag it with that and I exported everything nothing in the excel doc tells me I hit Visible's archive button for that result) I export the search, I remove everything I tagged as "archive" in excel and then I manual make charts. When I hit Visible's "archive" button it should be completely removed and if I made a mistake and I want to un-archive it, there should be a section where I can go and see everything I archived and be able to un-archive it.

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 loved the way Visible Intelligence was similar yet different from Radian6. Although I have more experience with Radian6, it still wasn't hard to use and get familiar with Visible Intelligence. I personally liked how easy it was to do your "thing" and conduct your analysis using VI. That is plenty of reason for me to consider re-using it in any project that requires social media analysis.

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

It's easy to user once you become familiar with it

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

My rep is always helpful and is timely with my requests

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 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!

Incentivized

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

• Faster/better content analysis.
• Faster return time of reports.