Item: Hootsuite
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I manage around 50 social media accounts across Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, for which I post every day. Hootsuite allows me to schedule posts and is fairly reliable, so that's why I use it. The business case this solves is simply that there would be no other way to manage hundreds of posts each week.

Pros and Cons

Scheduling
Reliable
URL shortening

The weird content scheduling thing that just changed. I've given it the old college try several times, but I can no longer drag and drop posts, which drives me nuts.
The whole 'posting score' thing is incomprehensible and needless. I have no idea why some days I score 88, but other days score 54 when I know my daily posting schedule is really consistent.
I have never had a good experience with customer service. This seems to be because I'm some kind of weird unicorn who only needs one seat/login but manages 50 accounts. No one on the Hootsuite end seems to know what to do with me and is never able to answer my questions. In every case, the interaction has ended with the Hootsuite person basically saying, "Oh my god, you have so many accounts! You should be on a more expensive plan!"
Since a more expensive plan would render the social media part of my business significantly less profitable (no one wants to pay real $ for social media management), my approach at the moment is simply to never contact Hootsuite customer service. If I have a question, I take it to Reddit.

Return on Investment

The biggest positive aspect is simply that I can do all my social posts in one place and have developed a system to do that. This reduces time and headache significantly.

Alternatives Considered

TweetDeck, Tweepi and HubSpot Marketing Hub

Honestly, it's been years since I used anything but Hootsuite. About five years ago, I did a bit of a vendor analysis and concluded that for my needs (which are primarily high-volume, high number of social media accounts), Hootsuite is the most cost-efficient option. However, let's face it: That's because my monthly fee is a lower, grandfathered rate.

Support Rating

As discussed earlier, no one at Hootsuite has ever been able to answer my questions, so I have stopped even trying to contact Hootsuite customer service. I think people are well-intentioned (that's why I'm not giving a 0), but I feel like I've been doing social media since before some of these kids were born, and my questions are just out of their league.

Another problem - and I'm not sure there's a fix for this - is that if you try to Google a Hootsuite-related question, looking for someone who maybe had the same problem and how they fixed it, it's virtually impossible to find an answer that doesn't come from Hootsuite itself. All the content on the Hootsuite site just sort of drowns the search algorithms and the first few results pages are corporate pages, most of which do not contain the answers you need. So you have to go to forums and hope for the best.

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

I recommend Hootsuite to professional social media people who need to manage 10+ accounts in one place. I also think it's useful if your marketing environment requires a lot of 'statistics' to provide to senior management. A combination of Hootsuite and SEMRush data can make even the worst social media performance look like 'metrics' are being 'tracked' in 'detail' - even though we all know that much of this data is just noise and about as useful/relevant to the actual marketing strategy as the Social Score measurement.

I will say - since I don't want to be entirely snarky - Hootsuite is pretty easy to use, so when I've needed to take a week or two off, I've been able to delegate my work to my assistant pretty easily.

A good tool for high-volume social media channel management.

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Hootsuite