10 HootSuite Alternatives

For many social media manager’s HootSuite is the one tool of the trade that everyone has to have. It’s the corporate choice for online marketers, the go to for publisher’s with several social media accounts to manage and the begrudged but secretly used scheduler of growth hackers. Yet, there are several shortcomings, the major ones being the restrictive bulk upload posts with images problem and prohibitively expensive reporting and team management, leaving many still looking for Hootsuite alternatives. Social media gurus have long been espousing the benefits and drawbacks of Hootsuite. On the surface though, Hootsuite is by far the best social media management tool out there. It’s integrated into 25 different social networks, it’s the best tool out there for managing multiple accounts with its social streams view, has a great overview of any audience engagement and allows you to target users based on location, language and demographics. It’s a mature platform with a stable, well funded company behind it. So why are social media managers looking for alternatives? The biggest drawback has to be its lack of being able to bulk upload tweets with images, something that DickyBird as a complimentary social media management tool has already solved. None of the other tools have managed to tackle the problem either really, so it’s mostly down to personal taste and workflow. That said, there are plenty of great alternatives out there. Here are the top 10 alternative social media management tools on the market. The best social media management tools out there BufferEasily the best fully fledged alternative to Hootsuite out there is Buffer. If you’re not using Hootsuite, you’re likely using or have come across Buffer already. Buffer has a nice interface, in fact it’s easily the slickest on the market. The walkthrough on sign up teaches you everything you need to know. There’s plenty of help once you start using it too. It has loads of suggestions for you as you go about filling up your feed with posts, even offering to post at the best times throughout the day. It has great analytics, showing you the best recent tweets and allowing you to save them to the library or “rebuffer” them immediately. Buffer is the much cooler cousin on the social media management market. SocialPilotI read that SocialPilot is what everyone at Facebook uses to schedule their social media. It goes some way to solving the bulk upload with images problem, allowing you to add a link to an image in one column, however doing this for a hundred links would be massive pain in the ass. One nice touch with bulk uploading though, is that it automatically removes duplicate posts from the schedule as Twitter doesn’t allow it. SocialPilot is also integrated with LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. It has a really clean interface, adding posts to the queue is super easy even an intern could do it. It also has a nice pause button to stop all activity, a bit like one of those big red buttons on the band saw in Design Technology classes. SproutSocialSproutSocial is a fully fledged tool, but feels a bit corporate. It also has a very corporate basic price of $99, making it something only the most serious of users will be able to afford. It integrates with all the usual main social networks, but the big win is its recent foray into Facebook Messenger, allowing social media managers to contact users directly from the console with chat. One of the real treats with using SproutSocial is definitely the analytics dashboard, it’s absolutely plastered with graphs and has loads of reports for you to click through and allow your inner nerd a bit of happiness. As with some of the other platforms, SproutSocial has a content suggester for content curators, which works nicely if you’re not paying for a BuzzSumo subscription. Despite the highlights doesn’t always feel like you’re getting everything you need with this platform, even though there’s plenty to look at. SendibleAnother mature social media management tool, Sendible is rated one of the top on the market. It integrates with all the major platforms Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram and others and also provides a “monitor” option which allows you to monitoring your social mentions across all the networks. I have to admit, of all the sign up pages of the tools here, Sendible’s is enough to turn you off. It features a full page of boxes to fill in, including your phone number and could really do with a “connect with Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn” sign up option. Once inside though the interface is slick and provides you with plenty of tools to manage your social engagement. The service is on the pricey side with the cheapest at $50, but you really get what you pay for in this case. AgoraPulseAgoraPulse makes a massive noise about being the Hootsuite alternative on their homepage, so you’d expect this one to have everything you want, and, it pretty much has. The user interface is great and easy to navigate, the toolbox includes plenty of reporting options. Team management is also good, you can easily invite your team mates and assign them roles. A really nice touch is the ability to monitor how your competitors are doing on social too, so you can stay ahead of the game. Pricing is competitive, with the cheapest option being around the $30 mark. The other five Hootsuite alternatives PostCron Super cheap option at a starting price of $9.99, but enough tools for a startup or small business. Includes a bulk uploader and a unique watermark tool that automatically adds your logo to images you post. Kuku A really basic stripped down tool. Schedules posts to all your social networks at once if you want to. This really is priced competitively, the most expensive option is $9.99 the cheapest is free! MavSocial This social media management tool provides many of its features for free, charging only for one or two add ons. There’s an enterprise version which takes some restrictions off and adds some reporting tools. Definitely worth a look. Oktopost Not as cute as its logo might lead you to believe, this is a pricey piece of kit that positions itself as a B2B social marketing tool. As you’d expect this is for the pros looking to find customers rather than engage with any old audience. At a minimum $200 a month, even though it does the business, most users will be looking for something a bit more affordable. Jollor Jollor has a unique payment plan, coming in very cheaply at $5 for a two man one social account team. As your team grows expect your costs to. That said the platform has some nice features and really seems to focus on team management of social, which in reality is what a lot of small business are doing rather than having a dedicated social manager. The only thing any of these tools is really lacking is the ability to easily include images into bulk posting. DickyBird makes a great complimentary tool to all of these suggestions as its able to bulk schedule ever green content at scale, while perhaps managing and monitoring to a finer degree using one of these other established services.