Hootsuite

Commentaires: Hootsuite is a great free tool for beginners and small social media teams! It's easy to use and has just about all of the basics you could need to start scheduling and managing social.

Avantages: Hootsuite is a great free solution for basic social media management. I enjoy the dashboard customizations, where you can pull in different channels and features (ex: posts, timelines, mentions, etc.) all in one easy-to-manage interface. It also makes social listening easy versus having to log in and manage notifications manually on each individual platform. In general, Hootsuite is easy to learn given some experience with other SaaS platforms. The interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. And, they offer a ton of free resources to help you get up to speed with the platform and social media management in general, which is nice. With the free version, you can manage three social profiles. This is great for personal use or for managing in-house social, but not ideal for agencies or managing multiple clients/accounts. Surprisingly, however, you can schedule as many posts as you want within those three profiles, which is great for advanced planning.

Inconvénients: The integrations and features/functionality could be better. I personally prefer to use HootSuite to schedule tweets and prefer to schedule other content for Facebook and LinkedIn within the actual platforms. It's fine to use HootSuite in a pinch, but you are able to do a lot more customizations within the individual platforms. Kind of a pain to do it separate/manually, but you get a better post/product in return. For example, you often can't add multiple images to a post or do a carousel-style post as you could directly within Facebook. Like most SaaS products that have a free version, there are limitations. For anything more than managing in-house or personal social, you'd likely need to invest in one of the paid plans and really compare what's offered in HootSuite vs some of the other more enterprise solutions. The reporting is also fairly limited and you'll likely have to work within the platforms directly or use other tools to get a full picture of social media performance.

Commentaires: I saved ENORMOUS amounts of time with Hootsuite. I can't imagine doing all that it helped me do manually... from monitoring comments, to responding to people, to scheduling multiple posts a week on multiple platforms per week, to everything in between. Hootsuite really helped me streamline my job even when we had limited budgets and resources to do anything else.

Avantages: I used to do full-time social media management and was using Hootsuite constantly to schedule posts for my clients and track social conversations and mentions in real time. I love how simple and easy it is to use – you'd never think multiple columns across your screen would work or keep you sane... but it gets the job done! I can easily respond to people, retweet it, flag it and more. Another awesome think I love about Hootsuite is the ability you have to help gather content. I was constantly looking for things to retweet to get engaged with others online, so I used one of my columns to track particular keywords. I could then get real-time tweets and posts from people talking about the topics I wanted to engage with and retweet for the brands I was managing. Honestly that made my job 100x easier!

Inconvénients: I do know it has been a little clunky for me in the past. Sometimes keyword columns won't update and I've had to delete and recreate the search – or I would schedule posts and the photos wouldn't go out. I think they have fixed some of these issues over the years. There is also a maximum number of columns you can create in the free version, so I sometimes ran into issues where I wanted to use more features but couldn't. But, overall, I appreciate the value I got for the $$.

Commentaires: It might feel like it's missing a few extras, but generally its a really useful platform and out social media activity has been much better in terms or both organisation and analytics. There's also a massive community for Hootsuite so you can always find out how other people are using it. We used a Meltwater before and it was so scientific and clunky to set up we never ended up using it. We use Hootsuite daily now and the ability to shorten links is also really helpful.

Avantages: Really easy to use and so many resources. The platform is brilliant for scheduling and you don't even have to visit the other social platforms to post and engage with the audience. You can really customise the streams for each user which is great for productivity, and the analytics is really useful. As a manager, I only have to hop into the publisher section to see what posts are going out, how often we're posting, and what platform we're using most. Using the streams, I can set up one for all posts to check consistency and monitor engagement, one for competitor research, and one for searches, and then more platform specific streams so I can really dive into the nitty-gritty if I need to.

Inconvénients: It's very Twitter orientated, most of the useful streams like monitoring topical conversations etc are in Twitter (probably by nature of the Twitter platform), but I would like to see more feature on LinkedIn - so far there's only TWO streams; one to monitor Company Updates, and second to monitor scheduled posts (I can see this in the publisher planner anyway). It would be good to see similar monitoring streams for Hashtag conversations because this feature is applicable in LinkedIn as well as Twitter. The Publisher also feels like it's just missing something and I think it's the ability to 'plot' in posts rather than drafting out complete posts. For example when we're planning what activity we want to launch, we might not know what the full post is going to look like, but we might just want to plot in ideas which at the moment we have to do on a spreadsheet and then translate over to the Hootsuite publisher. It would be good to see this feature in the planner where we can plot ideas, and then fully draft them out later.

Avantages: As a Hootsuite user for 7 years now, it is by far my favorite social media management software. Creating, optimizing, and posting social media for different platforms, etc. takes a lot more time than you would expect. Not only do you have to craft each post to fit each platform you’re posting to… you have to choose the best time, use the right hashtags, shorten URLS, and include something interesting (i.e. picture, video, content). Overall, what many believe will only take them 10 minutes, in reality it can take up 2-5 (or more) hours of your work week; even more when you include the content creation for the actual posting. Hootsuite is the best tool for compiling all your social media efforts into one dashboard you can work from and will definitely knock hours off your work week. PROS
The best feature of Hootsuite is the time you will gain. Most social media platforms have a scheduling aspect to them but having to manually log in and out of each one, to do so, is not feasible or conducive for speed. Hootsuite provides you with analytics on each of your chosen platforms, located in its dashboard, to help you identify the most optimal time(s) to schedule each post to be sent out; this especially comes in handy for days you know you will be on the go and/or do not have access to technology. You can also scroll through past social media posts, save unfinished drafts, and boost posts for content promos; which will provide you with more insight and/or a better understanding of which of your efforts and/or CTA’s are working best. Hootsuite’s platform has various analytics and reports you can export so your team(s) can measure things like conversion rates, marketing and sales initiatives, and improvements in monthly social capital. One of the neat things about this platform is the option to purchase additional social media management applications for things like YouTube Analytics and video posting, Wordpress blog analytics and posting, Google Analytics, etc. Hootsuite also provides the option to export reports (including customized reports) on any of the platforms connected to your account, to measure competition, areas of improvement, click stats, and which platform is bringing in the largest amount of traffic to your website/content, etc. Because the company I work for uses another third-party application (Lead Liaison) to track visitors and traffic sources to our website, we use the free version of Hootsuite.

Inconvénients: One of the cons of Hootsuite is its inability to detect whether or not your traffic is originating from an actual human or an automated bot. This can interfere with your data and make it hard to decipher if the data you have access to is valid or not; this is true for Google Analytics as well. To avoid this, we use a third-party application for visitor tracking (Lead Liaison). You may get notifications that your social network(s) have been disconnected from your dashboard; don’t worry, you simply just have to reconnect them. Although I am not sure why this happens so often, I trust that this has nothing to do the security of my account and I always receive notifications when I sign in to my account from a new device, etc.

Commentaires: Hootsuite and Buffer are my go to social media, despite the several other SM Managers that I've tried out. I work with 5 brands and I have to manage their social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn) I've been using Hootsuite (and Buffer) for three years but of the two Hootsuite is my favorite and my safe bet. I have a habit of testing out as many free marketing software's as I can find and in terms of social media marketing Hootsuite is the best. The interface is easy to use, and the tutorial available to each new signup is very helpful. I love being able to tag a Facebook page, Twitter profile or Instagram profile in a post. The android app is also fully functional on my Kindle Fire (Unlike Buffer) which is a plus. The Feedly> Hootsuite integration is a major plus, I've never used the Hootsuite RSS feed option even though I keep planning to, but I like being able to share informative posts from feedly (On my Kindle Fire) to Hootsuite. What I love the best is that the free plan unlike buffer lets you schedule as many posts as you want to 3 social media profiles. This is great because I can schedule a month worth of social media posts in three days unlike the 10 posts per profile restriction on the Buffer's free plan.
The analytics reports aren't very detailed and often I rely on Start a Fire as well as a variety of other software's to get in-depth analytics but the brands I work with do not understand or see the need for in-depth analysis so I suppose it's okay. I'm not happy that Hootsuite doesn't support posts with multiple images, I learnt that the awkward way when I made a post with 3 pictures. I recommend Hootsuite for beginners and Individuals who want a simple, straight forward social media manager. Oh, and the Hootsuite academy is very insightful.

Avantages: It is one of the simplest Social media managers in the market, the freeplan is great because it provides essential features for beginners and experts at no cost. I also like the mini tutorial for new users, at the right side of the dashboard. I personally use Tweetdeck for social listening on Twitter but Hootsuite is also great for that.

Inconvénients: I dont like the fact that if i want to schedule a post with multiple images i'll have to schedule it directly on Facebook or on Tweetdeck for twitter.