HootSuite

I was tasked one day in 2013 to find us software to make sure our company was "social". That was becoming the big thing and while social has been around for quite some time, it was something our company was rather new to. I had some experience with Twitter, Facebook, and what-not, but I logged into each platform individually to manage things personally. Our CEO had heard about software that made social pretty much "effort-less", and that caused us some headaches. Thankfully, HootSuite made those headaches go away. We were able to put our accounts in a single place. We started out with just myself managing things to having a few members of our support team on it in order to answer questions and resolve issues our customers were experiencing. The more we embraced social over the next few years, the more important it was for us to make sure every development was trumpeted through the "social".

We had a wake-up call in 2015 when we tried to get all of our team members on social media, or at least giving them access to our social accounts. HootSuite has some limitations and costs associated with adding team members. It started becoming cost-prohibitive to say the least. Since HootSuite has become one of the major players in the social management space, I have heard from colleagues about outrages prices for their teams. They don't put their enterprise pricing out there for good reason; it is incredibly expense. For many teams it is something that they cannot afford. When we realized we couldn't afford to have more than 10 users, we began to limit what we would do with Hootsuite. Our CEO began to look at the costs associated with the usage and realized how much we were paying for just 10 users. Since then, we continue to use HootSuite mostly because we are used to it and it works.

If you're a small team of a few people needing to get the word out on social media, HootSuite can work real well for you. If you're a large company with numerous departments and people that need access to social, then there are better solutions out there. HootSuite Enterprise can be a large cost to have to accept; there are competitors that have a better bid on the pricing for similar features.