Item: Hootsuite
Rating: 10
Author: Zachariah King

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our magazine website produces daily news updates and articles as well as a monthly magazine. We make use of Hootsuite to simplify our social media communications about the latest news and stories. Managing multiple social media channels can be tiring and time-consuming. If you had to go to each social media channel, sign in, upload images, and write stories it would be much more time-consuming and you would not get consistent branding and messaging. With Hootsuite, we simply did the setup of each social media channel we wanted to use once and now are able to post (and schedule posts) in one go. Hootsuite has access to a media library that you can choose free images from (very convenient) and it uses the same images across the different social media platforms (you can change it individually for each one but we like it to be consistent). The interface is pretty straight forward and the drafting is easy. A great feature is also the scheduler which is helpful for days when we know we will be busy or not available to post "live". It saves us both time and energy and is very easy to use.

Pros and Cons

Integrates with your social media accounts
Provides access to free stock images
Has a scheduler for convenience and planning ahead
Provides previews of how posts will look on different social media platforms
Allows customization of posts on particular social media platforms

For security reasons it occasionally makes you sign in to your social media accounts again. Good for safety but a bit of a pain.
The free version has a limited amount of social media accounts it can post to. Makes sense as they want to sell the pro version.

Return on Investment

It has saved us time.
It has saved us repetition of effort.
It has simplified how we post to social media.

Support Rating

We have never had a problem.

Key Insights

Do you think Hootsuite delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Hootsuite's feature set?

Yes

Did Hootsuite live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Hootsuite go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Hootsuite again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

You are going away and want to post a social media post each day without having to log in remotely and do so. Set up the posts in advance and then let Hootsuite do the work for you. Save yourself time by using Hootsuite to post to multiple platforms in one go. You do the design and layout in one panel then check the different social media channels tab by tab and make minor adjustments as needed to suit that platform (eg. Twitter has a smaller word count allowed).

Hootsuite is Pretty Sweet!

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Hootsuite