Is Hootsuite too sweet?
May 21, 2019

Is Hootsuite too sweet?

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Hootsuite Pro

Overall Satisfaction with Hootsuite

The marketing group used Hootsuite to manage several social media channels at once. It allowed the team to easily plan when posts were going to go live and what posts would be published on which channels. This made it easy to move quickly and adhere to the publishing calendar.
  • The scheduling feature is fantastic. It allows you to easily plan the exact day, time, and channel that a particular post will be published.
  • Mobile functionality is great with the app. The team could use it on their phones or tablets, which made it easy to make changes or additions on the go or in-between meetings.
  • Social channel integration. All of the major channels are integrated with the tool, making it easy to sign in and start using it.
  • Photo editing. The editing capabilities are rather minimal. We typically had to edit our photos and make changes to them outside of the tool before using them.
  • No functionality to post multiple photos to a channel like Instagram or Facebook. You can only post a single photo at a time, which is not ideal for some types of posts.
  • The UX is pretty bad. It is a multi-column setup, which was great when Hootsuite first started because it was a Twitter-only platform. Now that there are so many more channels, this layout doesn't work well.
5 - All users of Hootsuite were in the Marketing department focusing on different audiences: B2C and 3 separate B2B audiences. This made it even more difficult to use the tool because of the major split in audience type and the number of users dealing with the platform.
  • It allowed us to grow our social media following by nearly 50% because we were able to publish relevant and exciting content on a regular cadence.
  • It continued to negatively impact our budget due to the cost of adding users as we grew as an organization.
  • It helped reduce the team's time spent on publishing content on several channels by more than 70% due to being able to schedule posts and content for whenever we wanted it to go live.
Sprout Social has a better UI than Hootsuite. It uses a single feed approach compared to the multi-column layout that allows you to check and uncheck filters based on what you'd like to see at a given moment. Overall, Hootsuite was a better choice for our team given the stronger analytics reporting that it provided. Being in a data-driven business, this was particularly important to us to be able to provide performance metrics to leadership. Both tools are fairly similar, so it really is a toss-up in terms of which you should choose.
It is well suited for small teams that have only a few marketers that are wearing several hats throughout their day. It allows teams like that to easily manage several social channels at the same time. They can publish a variety of content only specific channels without the hassle of interacting with individual channels and websites. It is not suited for a large organization that has several groups within the Marketing department, especially when there are dedicated teams to specific social channels. It can get very pricey at an enterprise level, so I'd recommend finding a better, cheaper, more powerful tool than Hootsuite.

Hootsuite Feature Ratings

Boolean keyword searches
6
Filtering out noise/spam
8
Broad channel coverage
10
Content planning and scheduling
9
Audience targeting
3
Content optimization
3
Workflow management
7
Automated routing and prioritization
2
Customer interaction histories
6
Bulk actions
2
Content marketing
5
Twitter
9
Facebook
10
LinkedIn
8
Google+
Not Rated
Instagram
6
Pinterest
Not Rated
YouTube
Not Rated
Campaign success analytics
7
Real-time tracking
9
Competitor analysis
2
Role-based user permissions & privileges
6
Mobile access
9