After receiving an Email from Hootsuite informing me that it was time to “Go Pro or Stay Free” I had actually already made my decision. The price they are charging to me seemed fair and after having evaluated the alternatives I will save a lot more than $5.99/month of headaches by using Hootsuite. The deliberations started for me months back on Amplify with a very in depth discussion about Hootsuite’s earlier announcement that they were going to start charging for the premium features with their service.
Pro or Basic?
Hootsuite, why do I need thee so?
Hootsuite is my social media dashboard. I manage my Twitter and Facebook accounts on there. I also access many customer pages and accounts as well, it is super nice to be able to have one place to go for all of these things regardless of where I am located, so why do I love Hootsuite?:
- The platforms it supports (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm etc)
- The custom dashboards (must have, seriously!)
- Ability to access customers accounts and collaborate.
- Scheduling.
- RSS/Atom feed support. (This is a absolute must for some of my clients accounts)
The surprising thing is looking at that list, I don’t really mention a ton of the other “features” that Hootsuite includes now as a premium product:
Decisions, decisions.
I am actually greatly looking forward to playing with the Analytics and Insights integration. I also really appreciate the fact that I have a product I can grow into adding team members as needed for an additional fee.
The bottom line, Owl’s are a sound investment
Ultimately I put my pragmatic business person hat on when evaluating the decision to pay for HootSuite. I just don’t see a free alternative that would not require a lot more effort or perhaps multiple products to do what I want to do.
The Owls are Happy...
I decided to switch to Media Funnel: http://www.mediafunnel.com and I’m loving it.
@thecasualvegan someone suggested that during the original conversation on Amplify. I didn’t see any reason why media funnel would be better for my needs and it was more expensive at the time. What compelled you to switch?
@hackmanj I have a slower notebook and hootsuite was always sluggish, but really I just didn’t want to pay the $15 bucks/month to add a second user to my dashboard, Hoot just wasn’t cost effective when I can get similiar service from other companies. MediaFunnel gave me the second account manager for free.
I haven’t really gotten into the analytics yet, which seems to be a big selling point, but I’d love to read your opinion on it.
@hackmanj I have a slower notebook and hootsuite was always sluggish, but really I just didn’t want to pay the $15 bucks/month to add a second user to my dashboard. Hoot just wasn’t cost effective when I can get similiar service from other companies. MediaFunnel gave me the second account manager for free.
I haven’t really gotten into the analytics yet, and that seems to be a big selling point. I’d love to read your opinion on it.
@thecasualvegan I haven’t experienced the performance issues with Hootsuite that you have. I am fortunately at a good point in my hardware cycle right now, recent laptop and desktop system acquisitions. I think the cost per user could definitely be an issue but it looks like Mediafunnel charges $1 per user/per channel. Since I have 36 channels I’d pay $36 a month for one person or $72 with 2 users. Even if I culled out some of the lesser priority stuff I’d still be paying a pretty penny. I guess it depends on how many channels you are dealing with ultimately and what the other needs are. I could see using media funnel with select clients to monitor Twitter and Facebook for example, that would work.
Is Media Funnel all web based?
Thanks for your comment,
Joe
@hackmanj Wow, I can barely manage a handful of accounts, I don’t even want to try keeping up with 36 accounts! I’m not sure if they have a desktop client, I think it’s web based, you should ask them.
@thecasualvegan the number is a little deceiving because most of them I very rarely access but when I do need to access them it is nice to not have to login separately to them. I have a lot more to add actually 🙂
Check out GroupTweet.com if you can’t justify $15/month per Hootsuite team member. It obviously doesn’t offer all the features of Hootsuite, but GroupTweet will enable an UNLIMITED number of team members to contribute content to a single Twitter timeline for only $5/month. You will likely need to sign up for the premium account because you won’t want all of your followers to be able to publish DM’s to your Twitter timeline. The Premium account will give you features such as Author Whitelisting and Message Moderation. You can tweak the settings so it displays messages coming from different team members or just as if there was only one person managing the account.
Lastly, there is nothing to download and you can use GroupTweet in conjunction with any Twitter client out there, ie Tweetdeck, Twitter.com or even Hootsuite’s free version..
@RyanCraft Sounds interesting Ryan, thanks for the suggestion. Do you work for Grouptweet? If so I might want to arrange a chat with you to discuss the product for a possible future blog post. Thanks for your comment.
@hackmanj Yep, I own GroupTweet, we are a small team :). Would love to chat whenever, just drop me a line and let me know what you have in mind. ryan@grouptweet.com
@RyanCraft Thanks Ryan, I’ve added you to my “blogtopics” folder. One step closer! 🙂