Enterprise version very intuitive. Analytics weak.
October 16, 2012
Enterprise version very intuitive. Analytics weak.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Hootsuite Enterprise
Pros
- HootSuite is an intuitive tool. It really doesn’t need much training The UI is quite similar to Twitter or FB. It’s quite easy to ramp up – especially with access to HootSuite University and the broad range of online training tools. By contrast, Radian6 is not intuitive at all.
- HootSuite is good at releasing new functionality – there are frequent new releases. For example, they have just released a Chatter like feature. Even though our company has not figured out how to use Chatter effectively and think that it’s probably not for our organization, it does show innovation and a desire to want to keep up with new developments. This is clearly a response to Marketing Cloud.
- Our Professional Services rep is fantastic. The support team is also very responsive and effective. They always resolve issues immediately. This is particularly impressive considering how much we pay. We use some far more expensive applications that do not have anything close to the same customer service—both from the Support team (bugs) and the Client Success Manager.
- Thought leadership and category leadership. Hootsuite Enterprise has been adopted by top brands. Perhaps 20% of top brands are using the HootSuite product. This makes it a very easy internal sell.
Cons
- The number of bugs is surprising. This is not a critical issue– just annoying. They do resolve them quickly, but still a surprise.
- The Enterprise version has additional analytics. I wish there was a little more sophistication here. Although they are not bad, they are not at the level of Radian6 which has very strong analytics. For example, you can export data as a PDF or export data to Excel for further manipulation. Radian6 also allows for Boolean logic while HootSuite does not. In HootSuite, the reporting interface is very clunky. It does not look like a professional interface. You can definitely see the legacy of the mass-market tool in that the UI has not yet caught up with the Enterprise level product.
- No SFDC integration. They have not adopted the idea of closed loop marketing. For example, the capability of tying social media campaigns to sales (this tweet contributed to/ resulted in this sale. This does not seem to be part of their DNA.
- Not as much clarity on future roadmap as we would like.
- Adding accounts for users is a bit awkward. Still evolving into an enterprise solution—in some ways, parts of the free or freemium tool are still visible in the Enterprise interface.
7 - All are in marketing.
- Productivity. Scheduling is great. I particularly like the Hootlet button installed in browser. When searching on the Internet, and I want to promote brand / industry content, I click on the button and HootSuite automatically shortens the URL, pulls in the title, etc. This simple thing is a huge time saver. I don’t have to do any cutting and pasting.
- Also the auto-scheduler is a very cool feature. It’s a set and forget thing which allows HootSuite to decide on the best time to push out a tweet. Looking at re-tweets that catch fire, I can say that this works extremely well. Whatever algorithm they have is very effective. Anything auto-scheduled does better than content that is not auto-scheduled. This is kind of amazing. It also allows you to tweak the time (for example, we may not want posts to go out to close to each other).
• We had tried Sprout Social, primarily for posting and monitoring. Sprout had a great UI – perhaps a bit more modern than the HootSuite UI: It’s very intuitive and easy-to-use, but it didn’t have filtering. It presented one big stream. HootSuite allows filtering so that data can be categorized and presented in different columns. Sprout Social did had a great Twitter lookup tool which provided an easy way for me to pull up all my Twitter conversations with someone. This is the greatest tool ever. HootSuite doesn't have it. Also, Sprout Social does not have the same adoption as HootSuite, and that wide adoption made us feel more secure. For us HootSuite Enterprise was better choice.
• We also use Radian6 for listening and analytics.
• We also use Radian6 for listening and analytics.
Using Hootsuite Enterprise
- The primary processes are Publishing /Engagement and Team Management / Workflow (centralized management of multiple accounts)
- As social media has burst onto scene, every department is doing some kind of social outreach which makes for a management problem. We had no centralized way to manage all of various social media accounts. We wanted a hub with all identities in one place and a way to manage all the various handles. We also wanted a way to respond to posts across different accounts across channels with some workflow management. You can set permissions on accounts so that people can do certain things but not others. Permissioning is actually more flexible than in Pardot—you can adjust read-only versus publish privileges for each social network and designate an admin for each team, so there are more options than with Pardot, which only has a few set roles. Related to this is employee turnover. We need to be able to manage “ghost account” created by employees who have left. For many of our accounts, people who had ownership were had since left the company and we could not access these accounts.
- The other primary use case was to increase overall productivity. By being able to post to several networks at once.
Evaluating Hootsuite Enterprise and Competitors
• We did not have a company wide solution. Ad-hoc, point solutions.
Hootsuite Enterprise Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Hootsuite Enterprise Training
- Online training
Hootsuite Enterprise Support
No - Included with Enterprise version.
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