HootSuite was certainly the first well-known multi-social media management tool to be developed and used by small and large businesses, making its debut in 2008. While it’s a great platform for various reasons, there are also some features that can be problematic for some. One of the biggest downsides to HootSuite is the cost for its more professional features – fifty bucks a month per analytics report after the monthly free one; and using more than 10 team members starts at 18 G’s a year. You could buy a brand new car for that kind of money. Also, Facebook post audience responses- such as likes, comments and shares – cannot be tracked or credited by Facebook Insights when posts are made from HootSuite. Additionally, in my opinion and personal experience, HootSuite isn’t all that user-friendly. It takes a while to figure out how to optimize your social media via HootSuite features – even more so, if you pay for social media analysis and tracking. We all know time is money, so if you have a social media management team – all who need to learn how to use it- then it’s going to cost you even more. This isn’t a HootSuite-bashing blog post — HootSuite is great in a lot of ways and ideal for a lot of people. For smaller businesses and individuals, though, there are Hootsuite alternatives that could work much better for you.
1. Hootsuite Alternatives: Sprout Social
Just by looking at the screen shot here, you can tell Sprout Social’s user interface is very accommodating to users. Graphics provide instant information about social media content engagement, audience demographics, social scoring, clicks, views, influence and much more. Some of its best features are the Twitter Comparison Tool, which allows you to compare your Twitter account with competitors, and the Smart Inbox. The Smart Inbox allows you to respond to all social media account messages, post different types of content, and sort brand keywords – all from one inbox. Importantly, it’s fairly reasonably priced, starting at $39/month with a 30-day free trial.
2. Hootsuite Alternatives: Sendible
It’s very comparable to HootSuite and Sprout Social, but the big advantage here is its price tag, starting at $9.99 a month. For small businesses and start-ups, brand monitoring is highly important, and that’s what Sendible probably does best. Let’s say you just started a health drink and smoothie business, and you want to monitor your brand and competing brands for a keyword like omega juices. Sendible can tell you both positive and negative attributes about your brand and competitors. So not only can you immediately engage someone with a negative comment about your brand, but you can do the same for someone who has negative sentiments about a competing smoothie business. A word of warning though – if you choose to engage someone for this reason, use extreme delicacy and politeness, or it could blow up in your face.
While Sendible’s user interface is not all that sophisticated, the amount of data, analysis and brand monitoring it offers makes it well worth its price.
3. Hootsuite Alternatives: Socialbakers
This social media management platform combines the best of Sendible with the best of Sprout Social. It provides awesome data, has a great user interface, and is full of easy-to-understand graphs, charts and comparison bars. You can compare all of your social media accounts to those of your competitors, instead of just one social media account like many others offer.
Socialbakers also provides Youtube account management and comparison, which is not often included in other social media management tools. One of the very best things about this tool is that it analyzes which content most engages possible customers. If you provide civil law consulting services, you can continually improve and optimize your content by monitoring what most attracts and engages potential clients, which can help to expand your business. This platform is more expensive than the other alternatives, but also provides some fantastic features for the price. Fortunately, they do offer a 30-day free trial.
4. Hootsuite Alternatives: Oktopost
This one is especially for B2B businesses, who should have their own mention, simply because of the amount of businesses who operate B2B. Oktopost caters to optimizing time management, productivity, organization and maintaining relationships. It supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ accounts. As you can see, its user interface is a lot like that of Google analytics, so for most people, it will feel very familiar and be easy to understand and use. Oktopost offers a free account in addition to several paid versions.
5. Hootsuite Alternatives: MarketMeSuite
This one is for those of you who are not so social-media-tool-savvy. MarketMeSuite dashboard works much like email – you use the email-style inbox to type and post a message to all social media accounts. It also offers geographical targeting, so you can customize your focus to local, national or international campaigning.
There are a lot of other Hootsuite alternatives recommended by experts, including TweetDeck and Commun.It, which is a CRM (community/social media relationship management). There are a lot of Hootsuite alternatives out there that cater to just Twitter, and seem to be fairly popular, but if you also have Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube or Google+ accounts, using a Twitter-only platform doesn’t make much sense. The above five Hootsuite alternatives are just as robust as HootSuite — they provide all-around great social media account management, offer a lot of extras, and most of them also have a more attractive price tag.
asmithblog says
Such an informative post, Courtney. I had no idea all of these existed. I personally love hootsuite and use it for everything, but will definitely check these out to see if I like any of them better.
Glenn Brooke says
I’m with Adam — didn’t know about this diversity. How difficult is it to switch from one toolset to another?
Brit at Sprout Social says
Thanks for including Sprout in the round-up, Courtney!
Adem Smith says
Hi Brit,
I would like to suggest you to go ahead and try Blog2social, this is my personal favorite, not only you have a single dashboard which will help you post across platforms but also it requires no cron job done. You just have to simply install and activate it.
Sherwood_Botsford says
I’ve looked at HootSuite and several others of these, and walk away dissatisfied.
They presuppose a model I don’t buy: The model: That people want to interact with you on a daily or multiple times a day manner. I’ve signed up for these things, and usually I get annoyed enough within a week to unsubscribe, unfollow.
They also assume a generic national or international audience.
And finally they assume an audience measured in hundred of thousands.
My situation: I’m a tree farmer. I have a reputation for taking the time to give good advice, and sometiems sending people away, figureing that them getting the right tree from someone else will make more good will for me than getting teh wrong tree from me.
My niches are odd:
1. Acreage and farm owners — primarily shelterbelt trees.
2. Reclamation & Naturalization — primarily native species.
3. Edible landscaping — fruit trees, shrubs, edible perennials.
Almost all of my customers live on farms or acreages, or are city parks boards.
What I want to do: Rather than publish to MY FB page on a frequent basis, I want to publish on various FB group pages on an occasional basis. I’ve got about 20 groups now where I have made a bit of a rep for giving good advice. A lot of these pages have overlapping audiences. I don’t want to put a person in the position of seeing my post 3 times on one day. I want a way to systematically post a given post in 4 different groups 2 weeks apart, and to track the likes and comments on each. In general I don’t want to post more often than once a month on a given group, although this will vary.
The bulk of my posts are long. 300 to 1000 words usually with 1 or 2 pictures. Some will be shorter — a link to my web site, and 100 word abstract.
You can see how I run counter to their assumptions:
* I want to surface in their consciousness only now and then.
BUT: I want to engage them for much longer than a click of a ‘like’ button.
* 80% of my market is within a 2 hour drive.
I am not able to, nor wish to engage nationally.
* My audience is only 2% of that 100 mile circle.
Any recommendations for a package that does this?
Blanca N Valbuena says
Hope you all don’t mind me chiming in. I’m Blanca, one of the founders of Socialdraft. We’re fairly new to the market & I’d be thrilled if you gave us a chance. http://socialdraft.com/
Some of the cool stuff you can do on our dash:
1. Schedule posts to Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
2. Easily reschedule & recycle posts with a drag & drop action
3. Get real-time alerts on your brand
4. Manage social via our feed
5. And we’ve got a robust Instagram implementation (as much as they let us do with their API).
6. Use your own Bitly
7. Team Collaboration
8. CSV bulk uploading
We’re a scrappy team, and that means we care. so check us out & if you have q’s for me – reach out. I’m @jolie311 and @Socialdraftapp.
Blanca
Digisha Patel says
Nice list but I want to add SocialPilot because it is really great tool for scheduling unlimited posts. It has three different plans and all are very affordable compared to other tools.
• I can manage total 100 posts in a queue
• It allows 20 RSS feed
• Personalized Facebook branding is the latest features
• Bulk scheduling for my post
• Easily integrate your iOS App Store & Google Play Store accounts
• Totally flexible schedules for posting and campaigns
• Google Chrome plug-in with Bitly integration
I hope this helps you.
Clint Pitts says
I’d like to throw out one more option. Quadrant-Two Solutions has the MOST robust platform available. It was created specifically to fill the gaps left by the other alternatives on the market. We’ve even got a few features you won’t find anywhere else. If anyone is interested, please check out http://social.quadrant-two.com