General Overview

At first glance, Hootsuite is a Social Media scheduling tool, but that doesn’t begin to describe the hidden features that really give businesses value for money. With built in analytics and integrations all of the information you need is kept in one place. The consistent, sleek design makes the whole experience enjoyable and saves plenty of time and effort. You can find lots of blogs on their website including helpful templates to help you plan ahead.

The only real negatives with Hootsuite are minimal compared to the benefits and they are more nuisances than anything major. We did notice that the posts can be difficult to edit via the social media platform once they are live. The other feature that can be slightly frustrating is the accepted media aspect ratios and video lengths differing across different platforms. Our solution for this is ensuring that all media follows Hootsuite’s own guide (Social Media Image Sizes for 2021: Cheat Sheet for Every Network (hootsuite.com)) to avoid issues.

Free Plan

You don’t have to bankrupt yourself in order to schedule your posts in advance. Hootsuite has a free plan available that includes 2 social media accounts, 1 user and 5 posts scheduled at any one time. Even if you only have 1 social media account we would recommend utilising Hootsuite to save yourself time. Although the scheduled posts are limited to 5, you can still create as many posts as you need and save them as drafts to schedule later, also saving a lot of time. Due to the limitations, the free plan is not ideal for businesses who post daily or more and on more than one social account.

Professional Plan

Most small businesses aren’t going to be managing many social accounts so the professional plan, which offers 10 social media connections is ideal. At £39 a month, the unlimited scheduling feature is the major selling point for the professional plan. As a marketing company, we manage many of our client’s social media accounts as well as a few of our own so we find this feature invaluable. Having a plan for your social media posts in general is highly recommended and being able to bulk schedule will save your company masses of time in the long run.

Alternatives

There are of course alternatives to Hootsuite such as Facebook Business Suite, a free feature available to Facebook business pages. From our experience, using the Business centre is very counterintuitive and clunky compared to Hootsuite. Instead of just being directly implemented in the Facebook site, you have to open a separate application. The scheduled posts appear by default in list format. There is a calendar mode available, but yet again this is messy in comparison to the clean, visually appealing layout of the Hootsuite calendar.

You can integrate your Instagram business page to post simultaneously, which is helpful. However, the overall experience is not optimised and feels lackluster compared to the ease of Hootsuite. We also found that once the posts are scheduled, the process for editing the posts is confusing and often frustrating.

Analytics

Hootsuite’s built in analytics tools helps users create an effective marketing plan for their business. This is the perfect comparison tool to monitor which platform helps your posts perform. It includes all of the expected sections such as page interactions, geographics and what time your page fans are active.  

One unique feature included is Inbound Messages > Sentiment. Hootsuite monitors your inbound messages and determines whether the sentiment is positive or negative. It is vital to be aware of what people are sharing about your business as it affects your brand image, whether positively or negatively. You can then decide how you want to react to the results. (To find out how to perform your own sentiment analysis on your social media keep an eye out for our upcoming blog on our website Blog – Never Average Marketing). 

Integrations

There are over 20 app integrations available via Hootsuite. We have listed a few below to introduce you to the possibilities:

• Manage your Google My Business presence, alongside your social activity in Hootsuite. Whether a customer asks a question or leaves you a review on Google, you’ll have one place to monitor, engage, and strengthen relationships with customers. Plus, attract new customers by posting company updates right from Hootsuite!
• Canva for Hootsuite allows you to create engaging visual content directly from your Hootsuite dashboard. View recently created designs as a Hootsuite content source, add previously created designs into Hootsuite from your Canva folders, and easily attach designs to the Hootsuite Composer to share across your social networks.
• The Instagram Grid app lets you remix your photos and share them with your followers on Instagram directly from Hootsuite.

All integrations: Social Media Apps: Hootsuite App Directory – Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard – Hootsuite

For more information on how Hootsuite can optimise your social media plan, read their very own blogs or contact us to discuss your options.