Welcome to My Hootsuite Review
Social media platform, particularly Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have become the most thriving marketplaces for businesses to get leads and ultimately close sales.
With multiple social platforms out there, it’s very challenging for marketers to concurrently manage all social profiles at one time.
That’s the reason why it’s important to leverage a good social media management tool to establish effective and efficient social management.
One of the best tools in the market is called Hootsuite, which I’ve been using for years to manage both my business and my client’s social profiles from a single dashboard.
I literally use Hootsuite every day to post content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Just for your information, I am an affiliate marketer who works at home to earn a full-time income and also a small business marketer providing professional services to local businesses.
Here’s how I start this business if you are keen to know more.
However, I am in no way associated with Hootsuite except I am a frequent user, neither am I promoting this product to earn a commission.
That’s why you can be assured to only receive the most updated, honest and impartial review from me.
Now, let’s dig deeper into what is Hootsuite and how this marketing tool can help you quickly gain more social reach and engagements.
HOOTSUITE REVIEW SUMMARY
Product Name: Hootsuite
Founder/Owner: Ryan Holmes in 2008
Product Type: Social Media Management Tool
Price: Limited Free Plan at zero cost, Professional plan at $19/month, Team plan at $99/month, Business Plan at $599/month and finally Enterprise plan whereby the price will be determined based on quotation. Price varies according to the country you reside in.
Best For: Marketers and businesses managing multiple social accounts
Summary: Hootsuite is a social media management tool which allows you to manage multiple social media profiles from one single dashboard. Three main functions of this tool are social publishing, social listening and social analytics.
This means you can create content to publish immediately or schedule for publishing later, find and curate other people’s content from various social networks and finally gather performance data for reporting.
Rating: 9/10
Recommendation: Yes
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is a cloud-based social media management tool created by Ryan Holmes, a Canadian computer programmer and internet entrepreneur in 2008 through its agency Invoke Media.
This awesome social tool lets you create, curate and posts content to multiple social media accounts with one single click, and finally gather performance data of each social profiles for analysis and reporting.
Social networks supported by Hootsuite includes Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn. However, this platform only support Instagram for Business and not personal account.
Currently, there are 16 millions of Hootsuite users from over 175 countries and the CEO has announced last October 2018 that Hootsuite is once again up for sale at a valuation price of $750 million.
Hootsuite Price
Hootsuite offers multiple price plan according to the diverse needs of its subscribers which is explained in detail below.
Limited Free Plan: Hootsuite is free to start with for one user whereby you can manage up to 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled messages. Here’s the link if you want to sign up for Hootsuite Free Plan.
Professional Plan at $19/month: I am currently using Hootsuite Professional plan to manage up to 10 social profiles. This plan offers unlimited scheduling, can only be used by one user and comes with basic data analytics.
Team Plan at $99/month: This plan is most suited for small marketing agencies or freelancers who manage a small team. With this plan, you can have 3 users managing up to 20 social profiles and get access to custom analytics. This means you are able to customize the data that you want to show to your clients.
Business Plan at $599/month: As you pay more, you can have a team of 5 users, manage up to 35 social profiles collectively and setup flexible approval workflows. Unlike Free, Pro or Team plan, the support provided under this Business plan is upgraded to 24/7.
For Professional and Team plan, you’re offered 30 days free trial and if you opt for Business plan, there’s no free trial but will be replaced with a personal demo.
However, do bear in mind that once you choose either one of the paid plans to start your free trial, you can’t opt for another free trial with another plan.
If none of the above plans suits you then Hootsuite does provide Enterprise plan with a personalized offer at customized quotation.
Inside Hootsuite
Once you sign into Hootsuite, you will be directed to a member dashboard. Inside this dashboard, you can find all the core functions of Hootsuite on the left sidebar and account settings on the upper right corner
Before you can even start, you’ll need to add all the social profiles into Hootsuite by clicking the “adding Social Profile” tab under your account setting tab as shown below.
Just follow through the instructions and you’ll be on your way to start scheduling your post.
Here’s a simple quick start video showing how to setup and use Hootsuite immediately.
Three Main Features Inside Hootsuite
The three powerful features offered by Hootsuite are social publishing, social listening and social analytics.
This means you can create content to publish immediately to your social profiles or schedule for publishing later, find and curate other people’s content from various social networks and finally gather performance data for further analysis.
Social Publishing: Scheduling and publishing content is one of the main features all marketers need when deciding which social media management tool to use.
I use Hootsuite together with Canva, an image creation tool every day to create & publish image-rich posts on my Facebook and Twitter profile.
With Hootsuite, you can create your own content, curate other people content and finally share to your social profiles, either by publishing immediately, manually scheduled or let Hootsuite automatically scheduled for you based on its algorithm in finding the optimal time.
To easily manage all your scheduled content, Hootsuite Publisher Planner let you view all the content from one single planner.
You can then edit scheduled content, change publishing time, change social profiles, duplicate content or even re-post older content to a later date.
Social Listening: As the name indicates, Hootsuite helps you to discover specific topics and conversation going on in various social networks by setting up tabs and streams.
With this social listening feature, you won’t miss out the latest offerings and activities of your competitors, able to discover industry news and learn the trending topics being discussed by your targeted audience on each social network.
You can then respond to each topic by clicking like, comment, reply or share/retweet to build relationship with your audience.
All of these can be done directly from inside Hootsuite dashboard without the need to log into individual social accounts, thus saving you time and effort.
Social Analytics: Hootsuite’s social media analytics feature allows marketers to understand the performance of each social profiles and measure the success of their campaigns in real-time.
However, only subscribers of Hootsuite Team and beyond can have access to custom analytics with more advanced data for comparisons.
For Hootsuite Pro users, you can only access to its standard report that shows basic metrics such as the number of posts, followers, engagements, clicks, traffic & message sentiments.
All paid plans allow users to export report in PowerPoint presentation or pdf document.
Support Inside Hootsuite
Free Resource & Knowledge-base: Hootsuite offers free rich content via its blog and YouTube channel which includes tutorials, webinar, guides, research, industry reports, whitepapers, case studies including a Search ROI calculator for users to measure performance.
Hootsuite Academy: If you want to have a more in-depth understanding about Hootsuite dashboard, you can visit Hootsuite Academy, where you get video tutorials of how this platform works. It’s free for all paid subscribers.
However, if you want to get certified as Hootsuite professional, then choose from its paid training starting from $99 up to $999 for advanced social media strategy course.
Help & Support: There are a few ways you can reach Hootsuite support team depending on the plan that you subscribed to.
In general, all subscribers can access the support team via email, live chat and Twitter with the exception that business plan subscribers have the privilege to get 24/7 support.
Other than the above-said features, you can also boost your most engaging FB post on Hootsuite dashboard.
However, to understand how Hootsuite can help build your social reach, I suggest you try out Hootsuite 30-Day Free Trial yourself.
Who is Hootsuite for?
Hootsuite is created for marketers and businesses that want to leverage an effective tool to efficiently manage multiple social accounts to build and grow their social presence.
It helps to spy on your competitor or industry leaders so that you’re aware of what they are doing on each social network, particularly their current promotions, marketing effort and new offerings.
However, unless you know how to optimize the full potential of Hootsuite, otherwise, it might just become another scheduling tool that’s only meant to do this for your company.
That’s the reason why marketers must grasp the fundamentals and make full use of Hootsuite to their advantage.
To learn this, you can opt to enroll in their certification course or get more free tips via their free resources such as blog posts, guides and webinars.
The Truth About Hootsuite
Although Hootsuite is one of the best social media management tools in the market, there is still some hidden truth you must know which I’m going to reveal here.
Truth #1: Price Varies Depending on Location
While I am doing research on Hootsuite to give you a realistic review, I found out that this platform offers various price points depending on the country you are residing in.
Below is what I found out about the differences in price charged to people living in high income and middle to low-income countries.
As you can see from the above, people living in the high-income nations such as UK, US, Hong Kong and Singapore are paying more for Hootsuite compared to those living lower to the middle-income nation like Malaysia and Romania.
I am not sure why Hootsuite is having such standards in terms of its price strategy, but for me who lives in Malaysia, that’s an added advantage.
Truth #2: Expensive Team Plans
Yes, staying in Malaysia, the professional plan seems quite affordable at $19/month.
However, it becomes significantly expensive with a price leap to $99/month should you want to have a team of 3 users using the same Hootsuite account.
This also means, if you’re staying in UK or US, you’ll have to pay a higher price of $1,548 a year in order to let your team gain access to Hootsuite, which can be very costly in the long run.
Unless you run a small marketing agency and need your team to manage multiple client’s social profiles, otherwise, I suggest to only use Hootsuite Pro for one single user if you are a solopreneur like me.
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Truth #3: Restriction on Hootsuite Planner
Hootsuite Planner only shows post scheduled or published from within this platform. If you’re a person who only use Hootsuite to publish and schedule all your social posting, then it does not matter.
The problem is many of us use various tools or even post directly from Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.
Unlike Agorapulse and Sprout Social that shows all the social posting on one single calendar no matter which tool you use, the Hootsuite Planner only shows posts that have been posted via Hootsuite.
This means, if you use more than one tool, then it's impossible to keep track of all your social content using Hootsuite.
Things I Like About Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an affordable yet simple to use social media management tool that offers useful features to effectively manage your social activities.
I particularly like its content scheduling & publishing feature that allows anyone to auto-schedule each content based on the optimal time determined by its algorithm.
This means Hootsuite will decide what’s the best time to publish your post, thus generate higher social engagement for you.
You too can easily re-post past content and re-use for multiple times, optimizing full exposure of each content.
Another feature that I like is its social listening feature that provides information about my competitors, industry and the latest trend that can impact my brand, achieved by setting up tabs and streams.
Not only users are able to set up multiple tabs & streams inside Hootsuite Dashboard to discover specific topics discussed on various social networks, but Hootsuite also offers a Chrome extension called Hootlet to let you discover content of specific keywords on both worldwide web search results and social networks using Hootlet, a free extension for Google Chrome.
Here’s how it looks like when you do a Google search.
With Hootlet, you can share web content directly from your browser to selected social profiles, saving you time from the need to login and do it from inside Hootsuite dashboard.
The information gathered through Hootsuite will help businesses make a better decision, thus improve brand strategy and thereafter increase sales and business growth.
Is Hootsuite The Ultimate Social Media Management Tool?
Hootsuite is one of the ultimate social media management tool available in the market that is affordable and can effectively help businesses grow their social presence.
You can try Hootsuite Free Plan or opt for its 30-days free trial of any paid plan that comes with systematically designed video training on how to use the platform.
If you encounter any problem using this tool, its knowledge-base and support center can definitely come handy.
I suggest you give Hootsuite Pro a try to truly experience the benefits of using this powerful social media management tool.
How I Start A Small Business Online
I started my small business online by creating a niche website that offers honest, reliable and unbiased reviews on online business opportunities and marketing tools, including providing tips and useful resources to help people earn money online.
That’s the reason why Hootsuite is one important tool to grow my business as it makes managing social networks more efficiently, especially in scheduling my post on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Just like learning Hootsuite, I started my business following a step-by-step guide. There’s no short cut to achieve success at all.
It’s all about willingness to learn, to put in the effort and to consistently take action in order to see results.
If you too share my thoughts and would like to start a small business online, then I suggest you try My #1 Recommendation that shows you the exact method I use to successfully earn a decent income.
I hope you’re now convinced that Hootsuite is indeed one of the ultimate social media management tools to help grow your business presence online.
If you find this review useful, please share in your Facebook and Twitter so more people can make an informed decision.