Hootsuite is a cloud-based social media platform designed for businesses of all sizes. It is catered primarily for those people who are looking for a stable and powerful social media management tool. As such, the platform comes with strong features such as contact management, real-time editing and social analytics reporting. With over 16 million users across the globe, Hootsuite is one of the most widely used solutions in the current market. It covers a broad range of integrations that boosts your overall productivity and delivers efficiency in your daily operations.
It helps people through a variety of methods. From managing multiple contributors and updating several networks to gathering intelligence and generating social analytics reports, Hootsuite’s tools have been designed to meet the demands of your business.
When you’re managing a business, it can be difficult to keep track of mentions and management engagements from your customers. This is a major contributing factor as to why managers and business owners turn to social media platforms. With these, it’s easier to handle multiple social media accounts simultaneously.
Hootsuite Features
Scheduling
With this feature, you don’t have to go through manually updating each of your social media platforms one at a time. Instead, you can publish content and schedule posts simultaneously with the help of Hootsuite. This allows you to have an active social media presence and keep your audience engaged.
Content curation
Hootsuite’s content curation capabilities allow you to effectively find, manage and share from different sources. This gives you variety regarding what you post online. Other benefits include the ability to organize your content, access content stored from the cloud and view your scheduled posts with an integrated calendar.
Promotion
You can optimize your ad spending by targeting an audience based on geographic and personal demographics. This lets you reach people who you believe are more interested in what you’re selling. Moreover, you can boost posts on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Analytics
If you want to know how your business is doing, then you need a powerful analytics tool to provide you with essential information. The analytics feature in Hootsuite offers a variety of details such as overview reports, custom reports and team metrics. This ensures your content remains organic and applicable to your customers.
Monitoring
In order to stay relevant in a time where the hot topic constantly changes, you need a solution that has monitoring features. Hootsuite provides that through the following: custom streams, monitoring filters, team assignments and monitoring applications. With these, you can capture and track relevant conversations and respond to the comments and posts of your audience.
Hootsuite Benefits
Centralized location
Hootsuite has a unified location for business owners to manage various social media accounts and delegate tasks to their teams. This lessens the need to switch between different applications just to post content at the same time. It also allows users to improve the way they manage their marketing campaigns across several social profiles.
With third-party applications such as Vimeo, Instagram, MailChimp, Flickr, Tumblr and more, companies and business owners can widen their customer base.
Increased productivity and collaboration
Due to its centralized interface, people can work efficiently and collaborate better with their team members. Managers can also grant access and share data with their employees without sharing their passwords. Other features include assigning messages and tracking each response to these said tasks.
Insightful social media analytics
Hootsuite gathers information about your business’ mentions and engagements to provide insightful reports about them. With these said reports, you can upgrade marketing campaigns and change the content of your published posts. At the end of the day, these reports and data-driven insights can be the difference between success and failure. Knowing what your audience is talking about regarding your products and brand is a crucial factor in providing them with what they want.
Hootsuite Pricing
Hootsuite offers four pricing plans for its users to choose from. They vary according to the features offered and the level of scalability it can handle. The first two packages offer a free 30-day trial for you to test out its features and check to see if it’s suitable for your business. However, if you’re a freelancer or a small business owner, Hootsuite also has a limited free plan. This plan comes with three social profiles, 30 scheduled messages and a single user.
In line with this, the pricing plans are discussed below:
Professional
If your business has more than three social profiles, the free plan won’t suit your business needs. Instead, you should try out Professional. Priced at $19 per month, you are given control over 10 social profiles, unlimited scheduling benefits and a single user to control these profiles from. This plan also comes with an automated post scheduling feature, key performance metrics and an ad spend limit of $500 per month if you want to boost your posts. It also has integrated live chat support in case you’re having any difficulties.
This plan is perfect for entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Team
With a set price of $99 per month, Team offers 20 social profiles, unlimited scheduling functionality and a maximum of three users within the system. It has all the features highlighted in the previous plan but with additional ones as well. These come in the form of team message assignments, exportable reports, custom analytics and a spend limit of $2,000 per month.
This plan is primarily used by teams in SMBs.
Business
The next pricing package is Business whose price starts at $599 per month. Users can manage a maximum of 35 social profiles, complete with unlimited scheduling features and the ability to add up to 10 users within its interface. Other than having the features included in the Team plan, you also have flexible approval workflows, an hour of 1-on-1 onboarding, 24/7 support, an ad spend limit of $5,000 per month and five social media certifications.
Enterprise
The last pricing plan is Enterprise which doesn’t have a set price. With custom solutions, users can now speed up the processes behind their social media platforms. This is done by providing your teams with the necessary platform, support and advanced analytics to increase their efficiency.
This package is tailored and customized to fit the requirements of your business. It comes with a series of advanced features that includes team metric tracking, publishing approvals and priority support and training.
Conclusion
As mentioned before, keeping track of your social media outlets and engaging with your audience is a difficult task to manage, especially if you don’t have the right software solution for it. It’s easy to get overwhelmed unless you have a single, centralized platform to both get your updates from and schedule posts at the same time. With Hootsuite, users are promised an intuitive solution in which they can schedule relevant articles within a specific time period and offer collaboration tools to teams within a company.
Other than managing your social media outlets, Hootsuite also improves your overall reputation and strengthens your online presence. With the ability to promote and campaign across multiple social media platforms, you can expect people to tune in to the content you are publishing. These platforms include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Plus.
At the end of the day, if you’re looking for a popular and efficient social media management platform, Hootsuite is one of the top viable options.
