Hootsuite

Opmerkingen: 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.

Pluspunten: 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!

Minpunten: 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 $$.

Opmerkingen: 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.

Pluspunten: 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.

Minpunten: 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.