Hootsuite Review: Proven Tool with Decent Analytics Capabilities

Social media presence is imperative for every business’ success. And that is why, subscription to a social media management platform is also necessary, as manual posting on multiple channels is almost impossible. In this article, we’ll be reviewing Hootsuite – a certain social media management platform that has been around for more than a decade.

What is Hootsuite?

Launched in November 2008, Hootsuite is one of the more popular social media management platforms in the market today. It was initially a free, cloud-based tool for desktop users to manage all their social accounts from a single dashboard. This fueled its success in the initial years, with the app now regarded as one of the top five social media management tools in the world.

Hootsuite allows users to do simple stuff, like curate cool content and schedule posts, in an easy way. It also helps manage team members and measure ROI effectively. There are several different plans to choose from, from a single user plan up to a customized enterprise account that’s suitable for much larger organizations.

Best Features of Hootsuite

Here are some features that impressed us while reviewing Hootsuite.

• Simple dashboard

Hootsuite does well by keeping things simple. The dashboard is clearly laid out with main tool groups, product controls, and added services in a slide-out menu on the left side. There’s a lot of data present, which can be a bit disorienting at first but you later get used to it. Posting and scheduling is fun and easy, while Hootsuite recently added Twitter’s customer feedback feature as a way to improve social customer service and help Hootsuite function better.

• Easy to publish content

Being a social media management platform, Hootsuite must first do well on the publishing front. It does exactly that, making publishing and scheduling content easier than ever. It allows you to pull in content from sources including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and others, directly from the Hootsuite dashboard. You can even attach photos to your posts and publish or schedule them in fewer clicks. The premium plans, meanwhile, also give you easier access to the collaborative post queue, workflows, and content library with approved posts.

• Detailed analytics and reports

The Analytics control panel, which you get to from the main left-hand slide-out menu, is another great feature of Hootsuite. There are several templates for use in reporting and visualizing received data. Under Reports, you can also customize and build reports in the Report Builder by adding a header, select the type of reports and charts you desire, and add a company logo or label. Scheduling the dissemination of the report is also done in the Report Builder.

Pros and Cons:

Let us break Hootsuite down further, and look at some of its pros and cons.

Pros:

1. Comprehensive and proven social media management tool.
2. Decent analytics capabilities.
3. Easy for businesses to schedule posts for multiple accounts or clients.
4. An array of different plans.

Cons

1. The more powerful features are reserved for enterprise plans.
2. Analytics and insights may lack depth for some users.