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Usability quite poor.
February 06, 2013

Usability quite poor.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Hootsuite Pro

Modules Used

  • Streams, Publisher, Assignments, Teams

Overall Satisfaction with Hootsuite Pro

  • Publishing original content
  • Publishing responses to customer engagement
  • Across the board, usability is poor. I find it extremely difficult to navigate and perform common functions
  • Reporting is labor intensive, requiring me to build nearly everything by hand
  • Listening is difficult because streams UI is confusing and disjointed
  • Influencer identification is a hidden function that I had to search the internet for help to find
2 - Marketing and Customer Service
  • I am saving time by utilizing a platform that allows me to publish to multiple social accounts at once.
  • I am able to gather click-through data without having to utilize a separate service.
Sprout, Gremln
Hootsuite is a thorough product with poor usability

Using Hootsuite Pro

1 - Me
  • Publishing original content, sharing interesting articles, and responding to customer engagement
  • Listening for conversations about my brand, my industry, and my competition
I am always amazed when I see other people state that Hootsuite has a great UI. I find it to be one of the least intuitive interfaces I've ever worked with. Now that I've gotten through the learning curve (although I still find things that I didn't even know were there), I still have to train other people to use it and I suffer through their learning curve.

Evaluating Hootsuite Pro and Competitors

I have used several social media management systems for work, including Sprout, Gremln, and Spredfast. I have evaluated many others as a social media consultant. I was using Spredfast primarily.

Hootsuite Pro Implementation

It was fine. No hiccups signing up and getting my social accounts set up. Adding team members was harder than it should be because I have to create the team, invite the team members, and then add those members to the team. I would have thought inviting team members to the team would be the same as adding them to the team, but that is not the case.
  • Don't know
This is SaaS, so there isn;t any involved implementation.

Hootsuite Pro Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
Their videos are fine. I wouldn't say they are worse or better than their competition.
Yes and no. I have evaluated so many similar systems and I have experience building one of these systems. Based on that experience, I could find the major functions on my own. However, the usability problems made it more difficult than it should have been for me.

Hootsuite Pro Support

My implementation is pretty simple. It was not hard to set up at all.
No - I can typically figure these things out myself.

Using Hootsuite Pro

Publishing is a disjointed process where the elements of content and destination are actually separated. Listening forces me into a hierarchical organization that in not intuitive and forces me to navigate back and forth between streams constantly. Reporting forces me to build out everything by hand, instead of showing me the obvious metrics every social marketer needs right away.

Hootsuite Pro Reliability

I have never experienced any availability issues.
I haven't experienced any issues at all.

Integrating Hootsuite Pro

  • No, I have been able to add most other systems I wanted through their app directory
Not applicable

Relationship with Hootsuite