HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media management and posting tool which saves a lot time by helping curate, schedule and post content to multiple social media networks online simultaneously. You can enable several contributors who can share in a HootSuite account without sharing your passwords to create social streams, columns and tabs. You can also monitor responses and delegate messages to team members. I like the ability to utilize business intelligence to track brand mentions online in real time. That's powerful for discovering brand advocates, intercepting negative reviews to comment or take action on the situation quickly, while engaging in an ongoing dialog with people who love your brand. You can also create and analyze custom analytics reports or use the one of the thirty report templates provided. I really like the scheduling feature which enables you to reach your target audience at the best time on various social platforms including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The team feature is cool too it would ensure accountability and that there are not multiple responses to posts when it's not necessary. The pricing for a professional account upgrade is very reasonable at about $10 per month, per user. That enables up to fifty social media profiles up from three in the free account along with up to eight campaigns along with advanced message scheduling.

The user interface is not very user friendly. It has almost too much space when you first login to your account. The first step required to utilize your account is not obvious. They do lead you through an interactive tutorial wizard upon first logging in and I appreciate that feature in any software a lot. But it didn't provide comprehensive information regarding all features available. It gets things started and then leaves you to explore the account. Which is fine but the terminology they use to structure workflows inside the dashboard wasn't second nature to me after the tutorial wizard. And I found myself staring at my account thinking what's next? I love learning and have no problem taking the time to learn HootSuite. I'm confident it does what it says very well and would save massive amounts of time once it became familiar but at first glance it feels foreign or cryptic to me somehow. I've used HootSuite in the past along with similar softwares so I thought to see if this was still the same impression I got and it is. So I'm doing my research to learn how other social media marketing platforms compare in ease of use, costs and overall value. I wasn't sold immediately on making HootSuite a daily part of my marketing approach. HootSuite doesn't integrate with CRM's, email or your website. It remains focused on social media specialization only. There are popular social media sites not available to post from HootSuite and I've read they are slow to adopt new social networks. There's also no way to send different content to your social media accounts simultaneously. Posting the same content to each seems a bit spammy. There are ways to quickly trigger dynamic keyword tags in other similar software which can vary the content posted while it still remains 100% legible and readable. HootSuite provides support in Japanese, Italian and French which is great but considering social media is global they would do well to support several other languages.

There's no doubt HootSuite would save a lot of time once it was learned. There would be a learning curve for new users and onboarding big teams but with a HootSuite University option the training would be expedited and self learning minimized. With a free account available and no credit card required it's a no brainer that HootSuite should get checked out to see it's the best social media marketing and brand engagement tool for your business.