Hootsuite is a multi-channel social media management platform

10-second breakdown:

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that simplifies curating and scheduling content, engages with your audiences and gives you a detailed overview of your entire social media activity. Recommended for companies with multiple social channels looking to maintain and grow their online following and reach.

Hootsuite is used in small (0-50 employees) and medium sized companies (51-1,000 employees).

The good:

For a substantial social media activity, it’s great to be able to monitor multiple streams in one place. It also allows you to manage so many different social networks.

You can also add more than one of the same network which, again, is great for a great volume of social media activity. You can clearly segment your messaging to your different audiences but still have them all in one place.

With Hootsuite teams, you can enhance the workflow of your entire marketing and social media team – curation, approval, posting, everything is there.

They’ve mastered the art of cross platform, making it work on Mac OSX, Windows, Linux and mobile platforms. It works on all modern browsers. Hootsuite mobile apps are available for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android.

The bad:

The interface of Hootsuite is not the most user-friendly of platforms. It can be confusing for a while until you get the hang of it.

For some users, its complexity becomes a disadvantage – as the number of social networks grows, so does the feeling of overwhelming activity; suddenly your dashboard is very crowded.

Simplicity-lovers have a hard time dealing with the UX and all the available features.

While the app directory can seem like a fun box of surprises, one might argue that it’s too complicated to deal with 3^rd party apps, some with their own payment plan, above the cost of Hootsuite.

How it works:

Hootsuite enables the easy management of posts and social media accounts.

With three available plans, the app allows you to manage multiple social profiles, schedule messages, track brand mentions, analyze social media traffic and more. I especially like the way they’ve structured these three plans because it’s easy to figure out which one best suits your needs.

The free plan is for “Personal Use, Casual Enthusiast” as they put it, with a 30-days free trial and a suitable list of features. The pro plan is intended for “Small Businesses, Social Media Professionals & Consultants” and the enterprise one for “Businesses, Organizations, Agencies & Governments”.

To get started with your newly created account, you have to connect your social networks – up to 3 for free users, 50 for pro and 100+ for enterprise. Talk about multiple accounts.

A quick tip: You can connect, add and remove social networks form your member profile (hootsuite.com/dashboard#/member).

Here are the available social networks: Twitter, Facebook (profiles, events, groups & pages), LinkedIn (profiles, pages & groups), Google+ Pages, WordPress and the newly added Instagram. You can also manage several other networks via 3^rd party apps, such as Pinterest, using the Tailwind app available in the app directory, which we’ll get to in a moment.

On your dashboard, you can now set up tabs and streams. Different social networks offer different stream types, which can be grouped into tabs. For example, under the Twitter tab for a given account, you can have several streams, such as mentions, retweets, followers, inbox, scheduled posts, hashtag monitoring and others.

Content curation is made easy with Hootlet, a free browser extension for Chrome that lets you quickly share content to your social networks from anywhere on the web.

You can also install a series of apps from the app directory, a library of free and premium (paid) 3^rd party apps developed for the Hootsuite dashboard. Apps like Storify, Right Relevance, TrendSpottr and Scoop.it are great for content curation.

The app directory is also home to another 140+ apps that can power-up your social media efforts big time – such as Pinterest management with Tailwind.

Your scheduled content is managed from the publisher section of the Hootsuite dashboard, where you have a calendar view. There are four ways to view past and present scheduled messages in Hootsuite’s publisher list (default view), day, week and month.

You can also curate content from RSS feeds here in the publisher section.

Posts can also be uploaded in bulk, which is an option many agencies prefer, when dealing with an already established content editing and publishing workflow. It’s also a great time-saving feature, allowing you to schedule up to 350 messages at one time, per social network.

For bulk uploads, URLs should be kept to around 120 characters, the accepted date format is: mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm or dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm (in 24-hour time), post times should be set at least 10 minutes ahead of your upload time and you can only define one message per time slot. Duplicate messages are not allowed and your upload file should be a .csv (comma separated values).

Next up, a quick overview of Hootsuite analytics.

The reports available in this section compile and visualize your social media data based on the templates and modules selected when the report is built. Custom data can be compiled from sources including Twitter, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and Ow.ly. Data may also be supplemented with textual commentary. Hootsuite reports require analytics points to build them. Reports use modules and templates that range in point value.

Depending on your plan, you can also access custom templates, pre-built with specific modules to get you started. These can be further customized by adding, editing or removing modules.

Hootsuite ads is currently in beta and is only available for Facebook pages. The feature enables you to create and monitor Facebook promotions, suggesting which of your existing posts to promote based on your advertising objective.

Under the contacts section, you can manage Twitter followers and users you’re following, as well as Google+ circles contacts.

A fairly recently rolled-out feature, the content library, helps organizations extend their social reach by centralizing pre-approved, company-branded content for enterprise users to freely share on social media. With the Hootsuite content library, companies can simplify social content sharing, amplification and management, enhance team workflows and ensure content compliancy.

All in all it’s a great tool for social media management. It’s also one of the most popular ones. Its integration with so many social platforms makes it unique and very valuable.

For complete rankings of all social media managers, go here.

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