Since its launch, Hootsuite has been helping brands make the most of their online presence. Most business leaders have caught on to the importance of having an effective social media strategy but not everyone knows how best to implement that strategy.
Managing your company’s social media profiles and engagement can seem like a daunting task considering the speed at which online communication and engagement move. Social media management platforms such as Hootsuite help to make it easier to have an effective social media presence.
With several social media management platforms on the market, it is essential to make an informed decision in order to select the one that works best for you and your clients’ needs. Let’s take a closer look at how Hootsuite stands apart from the competition.
What is Hootsuite?
As evidenced by the competition among emerging monitoring and analytics companies, social media can provide important insight into markets, competition and popular perception of a brand. Discussions about media or products are more and more frequently happening in virtual spaces, especially now with more people than ever working from home.
As younger consumers tend to be more comfortable tweeting at or direct messaging a company rather than calling a help line to solve a problem, having a visible (and responsive) cross-platform presence is a must. This is where Hootsuite can help.
Hootsuite is a social media integration dashboard that allows users to manage their brand’s online presence. It allows for integration across social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn. It is used by companies in a variety of sectors, including tech, transportation, hospitality, education and the arts.
Tools Hootsuite offers
While some of their competitors offer a staggering array of tools and plug-ins, Hootsuite focuses on five key features to help brands implement their social media strategy effectively. This streamlined offering ensures that your company isn’t paying for unnecessary tools. The core features are broken down into these categories: Publish, Engage, Monitor, Advertise and Analyse.
Publish
The publishing tools are perhaps the most important part of what Hootsuite offers. It is possible to schedule posts in advance, schedule multiple posts at the same time, and to use the automatic scheduler to avoid any gaps in social media content.
Hootsuite offers a single calendar view that allows users to see all scheduled posts across all platforms. There is also a compose feature that auto-adjusts videos and images to the publishing platform’s requirements, ensuring that content is accessible.
Engage
The Engage feature revolves around monitoring consumer engagement and managing incoming messages across platforms. Having all your social media messages sorted into a single inbox makes it much easier to manage and less likely that messages will be missed.
The Hootsuite dashboard also makes it possible to monitor trends and posts’ performance, ensuring that brands can be aware of which elements of their social media strategy are working and which need to be reconsidered.
Monitor
Like the tools in Engage, the Monitor features help users to get a clear idea of how consumers are interacting with their social media. Hootsuite Insights, which is powered by Brandwatch, gives users the ability to get insights into their audience.
Searches can be tailored to match exact criteria, filtering by date, location, demographics and keywords in order to give users a clear understanding of exactly how their brand is perceived. Although Hootsuite does not offer its own social listening tools, it does recognise this shortfall and thus makes it possible to integrate popular social listening tools such as Brandwatch and Talkwalker.
Advertise
Placing ads on social media has become a powerful marketing tool and Hootsuite’s advertising features help users take full advantage of this medium. Hootsuite Ads lets users manage their search and social advertising in the same place, making it easier to launch coordinated campaigns and to track their effectiveness. They also provide tools designed to improve the visibility of your brands’ organic content – helping you reach new, targeted audiences.
Analyse
While all of these tools and features are great for launching and managing a social media strategy across multiple platforms, without a way to see how effective the campaign is, what’s the point? Hootsuite solves this problem with their thorough and incisive analytics.
This allows users to customise reports in order to extract the facts and figures that matter most to their brand. Another tool, Hootsuite Impact, makes it easier to crunch the numbers and see your brand’s ROI on social media spending.
Hootsuite Academy
One thing that sets Hootsuite apart from the competition is their training program, Hootsuite Academy. They offer training courses and certification in all things social media, as well as courses relating to the platform.
The certification courses they offer include topics such as Social Selling, Social Media ROI and Value Analysis, and Social Advertising. These topics are all valuable for marketing professionals looking to improve their social media skills and they are priced accordingly, ranging from $99 to $999 USD. Whether or not investing in one of these courses is worthwhile for you or your staff depends largely on your industry and its standards.
Hootsuite’s plans
Hootsuite offers a variety of plans suitable for every business size: Professional, Team, Business and Enterprise. The Professional plan is ideal for freelancers or small businesses that are new to having a social media presence. It allows for one user with up to 10 linked accounts to schedule unlimited posts and access messages from all accounts in a single inbox.
The Team account is ideal for smaller businesses, allowing three users to link up to 20 social media accounts. The Business plan is best suited for large brands, while the Enterprise plan can be customised to suit your brand’s exact needs and specifications.
If improving the online presence of your brand appeals to you but you are unsure where to begin, working with an agency that is adept at content marketing and creating effective SEO campaigns is a great place to start. Contact us today to discuss the services we provide.
