How to Automate and Manage Your Social Media – Hootsuite Review

How you can benefit from social media scheduling programs:

• Automate scheduling. Automating tasks like scheduling recurrent posts, sharing blog posts, sharing events, and spreading out your posts will save you a lot of time.
• Spread out your posts. Space out your blog posts and articles over hours or days instead of sending all your content at once.
• Reach a larger audience by posting your updates at the best time and date.
• Schedule time-sensitive tweets in advance so you don’t forget to send important messages.
• Remind people of any kind of deadline.
• Remind people of an upcoming event, seminar, or webinar.
• Remind people of discounts or specials that will expire soon.

Hootsuite vs Social Pilot comparison 

Benefits of both social media management programs

• Both systems enable you to manage multiple social media accounts in one place by logging into one account.  You don’t have to log in and remember the passwords for each social media.
• I like that I can outsource work without sharing passwords of my social media accounts. With both Hootsuite and  Social Pilot, you can share access and data with several contributors without sharing passwords.  You can even narrow down access to specific Facebook pages and Pinterest boards with Social Pilot.
• Both programs have good analytics.

I have used Hootsuite for six years for bulk scheduling to Twitter and Facebook. I was using the professional plan because the lower plan didn’t give me enough posts per day.

Hootsuite was inexpensive a couple of years ago. Now, I feel that it's too expensive for what it does.

A little over a year ago, I  started using Social Pilot to bulk schedule image posts on Twitter and Facebook. I liked Hootsuite but I am now doing my bulk scheduling with Social Pilot because Hootsuite can not BULK schedule IMAGE posts in one step.

Benefits of SocialPilot

• I like SocialPilot a lot.
• I love their bulk scheduling.
• I love their reporting system which notifies and alerts me when there is a problem with a post, a network error, or an access issue to one of the social sites.
• I find Social Pilot easier to use and easier to get started with than Hootsuite.
• SocialPilot is very user-friendly. I find it more user-friendly than Hootsuite. I was able to set up my posts without reading any instructions, looking at any tutorials, or watching any videos.

One big difference between Hootsuite and SocialPilot

• Hootsuite can not BULK schedule IMAGE posts in one step. With Hootsuite, you have to bulk schedule the text posts first. Then you have to go back and add each image manually to the scheduled posts. That’s not practical and I don't like that.  That’s why I switched over to using Social Pilot. 
• Another note about bulk scheduling. You can still bulk schedule images with Social Pilot to Twitter and Facebook (and other social media) by adding the image URLs to your CSV files. But when bulk scheduling image posts to Pinterest with Social Pilot it takes the image from the web page. This is because of Pinterest API and has nothing to do with their system but I find that very limited as I make several images for each blog post and I regularly test new images.
• The engagement features are the biggest benefit of Hootsuite.

Click here to check out Social Pilot.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool. It helps you manage your social network channels, helps you monitor what people are saying about your brand and respond, view streams from multiple networks, post updates and reply.

Here are some of the features of Hootsuite:

• You can post updates, connect with your clients, and review responses on more than thirty-five popular social networks including Twitter, LinkedIn (including Pages, Profiles, and Groups), Foursquare, Facebook (including Events, Groups, Profiles, and Fan Pages), Instagram posts, Pinterest pins, Google+, and WordPress blogs.
• Using third-party apps, Hootsuite also connects you with other platforms, including Vimeo, Via.me, Instagram, Evernote, MailChimp, Storify, Edocr, Slideshare, Flickr, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, and Reddit.
• Hootsuite is great for scheduling text messages. You can schedule updates to specific social media accounts at specific times. This is handy to schedule posts at specific times and spread them out when you are away from your computer. I set up my messages for a complete month and don’t have to think about it until the next month.
• Hootsuite App Directory (Instagram, SlideShare, YouTube, MailChimp, and many more).
• Engagement, Team Collaboration, Analytics.
• Remind people of an upcoming event, seminar, or webinar.
• An awesome feature Hootsuite offers is to schedule based on high traffic times, so you know you’ll always push out your posts to the highest audience.
• Another interesting feature is that you can search Twitter for trending hashtags and easily retweet from a limitless number of hashtags that you follow.

Some negatives of Hootsuite

• When I first started using Hootsuite (and occasionally after that too), I was getting some error messages. The problem was related to the date formatting. TIP: If you're using Excel make sure the date column’s formatting is set to General and not Date.
• As mentioned above, Hootsuite can not BULK schedule IMAGE posts – at least not in one step. With Hootsuite, you have to bulk schedule the text posts first. Then you have to go back and add each image manually to the scheduled posts. That’s not practical and I didn’t like that at all.  That’s why I switched over to using Social Pilot. 
• Hootsuite used to be inexpensive. When I first had an account, I was only paying $5/month. Now fees start at $29/month – that's a big price increase!

Hootsuite Fees:

• Hootsuite has a limited free plan – It’s free up to 30 scheduled posts at a time. Once you reach the limit of 30 messages, you won’t be able to schedule another message until one of your scheduled messages is published or deleted.  The free version may be enough for some bloggers.  For unlimited scheduled messages, try the professional plan.
• Rates start now at $29/mo for the Professional plan which gives you 10 profiles – unlimited scheduling – 1 user
• The different plans allow a different number of social profiles.
• Some plans allow unlimited scheduling, multiple users, bulk scheduling, analytics, social sweepstakes, and unlimited RSS integrations.
• With the higher plans you’ll get more social profiles, more users, team features, professional features, custom analytics reports, team assignments, contest templates, one or more custom branded URLs and a social media certification, publishing approvals, premium app integrations, custom branded URLs, social media certifications, 24/7 priority support and extended training. They even offer an Enterprise plan with customizable features.

NOTE: Automating saves you a lot of time but there are some tasks I recommend that you do manually like sending a reply to posts, commenting on posts, replying to Tweets and more.

Conclusion

Both Hootsuite and Hootsuite are great social media management tools. Which one you choose depends on what you want to do and how much you want to spend to automate your social media.

Social Media Resources

• Tailwind – The best scheduling tool for Pinterest. They have an Instagram version too. You can read my Tailwind review here.
• SocialPilot – Automates scheduling for a wide range of social media (I'm using it for Twitter and Facebook scheduling). You can read my review of Social Pilot here.
• Hootsuite – Automates scheduling for several social media (I used to use it but switched to using SocialPilot).
• SmarterQueue – An all-in-one social media management tool that boosts engagement and lets you curate, schedule, listen, reply and analyze in one place (SmarterQueue comes highly recommended by experts and I will check it out soon).
• Social Media Marketing World 2021 – Discover the best social media marketing techniques from the world’s top experts. Or get the 2020 recordings.
• Check out this planner bundle to help you plan your social media, your marketing and your newsletters.