Whether you are an established business or just starting, it is imperative that in your business plan a section on Social Media Marketing is included.
From a design perspective, Sprout Social is much easier to look at and use. Hootsuite favors function over form. Hootsuite has the edge in reporting, though Sprout Social offers more extras, like social CRM and audience discovery.
In the end, it depends what you’re looking for. Both solutions are excellent tools for managing your social media, but the difference lies in which capabilities are most important to your organization.
Hootsuite lets users build adjacent feeds across a single dashboard and customize the type of information that each feed displays. That means you can set up a feed for each of your social accounts and create more specific filters on each of those accounts — e.g. posts from Facebook or incoming tweets.
Sprout Social instead aggregates posts into a single feed. You can customize the information in the feed by checking and unchecking filters, and you can also move to a network-specific view (for example, everything from LinkedIn) with one click.
Social media management tools are your best friends when it comes to integrating social media into your marketing strategy.
They can help you manage multiple profiles, track specific keywords, as well as allow you to schedule your posts in advance so you don’t have to spend hours every day coming up with content and logging into various accounts just to post updates.
The following table is taken from a recent post.
|
Features |
Hootsuite |
Sprout Social |
|
Free Plan |
Yes |
No, but offers 30-day free trial |
|
Pricing |
From $8.99/month billed annually |
From $59/user/month |
|
Social Media Platforms |
Facebook (profile, page, group), Twitter, LinkedIn (profile, group, company), Google+ (pages only), extra profiles via third-party apps |
Facebook (pages), Twitter, LinkedIn (profile, company), Google+ (pages only), Instagram |
|
Analytics |
Posts, follower’s growth, engagement, and traffic; basic analytics are free, advanced analytics are a paid feature |
Audience growth and analysis, post engagements, trends, social media listening |
|
Collaboration |
Yes on paid plans |
Yes |
|
Publishing |
Yes and you can add an RSS feed even on the free plan |
Yes |
|
Scheduling |
Yes, unlimited |
Yes, unlimited |
|
Extra Features |
Very customizable dashboard, bulk upload of messages on paid plans, custom shortener, multiple images in posts, content suggestions, and custom time settings |
Publish send time optimization, social CRM, unified inbox, bit.ly integration |
Hootsuite:
Price: Free, $8.99/month for Pro Version; Business and Enterprise plans depend on the number of users.
Primary Focus: Manage all your social networks in one spot with a customizable dashboard that lets you see several feeds at once.
Sprout Social:
Price: Deluxe plan for $59/user/month; $99/user/month for Premium Plan; $500/month with three users for the Team plan.
Primary Focus: An all in one social media management tool that lets you schedule, publish, analyze, and engage with your audience.
Choosing the right platform to use has so many variables. Each platform has it pros and cons. Do your research. Try out the free or trial plans.
If you need to plan your social media strategy and align it with your business goals better, then contact us and we’ll put together the right option for you.