Features, Pros & Cons – Forbes Advisor

As one of the most robust social media management tools, Hootsuite has a large number of features that help businesses manage different social media accounts in one place more effectively. Its core offerings include social media content planning and publishing, audience engagement tools, analytics and social advertising.

Content Planning and Publishing

Hootsuite’s original main feature was its ability to connect multiple social accounts in one place and use one content calendar to schedule and publish content―and it’s still one of the key features today. It has a robust content calendar where users can view all upcoming posts and a user-friendly tool to create and schedule posts complete with the ability to upload images or graphics, add images from its built-in stock library or design visuals with Canva directly through the Hootsuite interface. It also has a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistant to help users craft compelling social content.

Again, it’s a very easy-to-use tool that makes the process of creating content a lot quicker and easier. It even has an “Inspiration” section to help you come up with new content ideas, repurpose high-performing content and convert website content, such as blog posts, into social posts.

Social Media Engagement Tools

In addition to helping users build out quality content, Hootsuite also helps users more effectively engage with their audiences. It has a helpful unified social inbox where you can monitor all direct messages across social platforms in one place. As simple as it sounds, it’s a tremendous time-saver and helps ensure that you and your team never miss a message. It also has listening streams to help you identify and stay ahead of trending topics better, auto-responders to answer questions 24/7 and assignment tags quickly to route communications better.

Analytics

Part of what makes Hootsuite so powerful is its ability to collect, unify and disseminate data across all social accounts with its unified social analytics, giving users great insights that they might be hard-pressed to gain on their own. It has customizable social media analytics reports as well as reports that compare your performance to others in your industry. This way businesses can gauge their own performance to industry benchmarks and use the insights to stay ahead of the competition.

Advertising

Businesses that advertise on social, can manage their paid content in addition to their organic content on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. How it works is that you can set up “auto-boost” existing ad campaigns through Hootsuite, which auto-optimize effectively based on your set objectives, timelines, criteria and audiences. However, it’s worth noting that you have to set up ad campaigns directly through the ad platforms, such as Facebook Ads to use this feature.

This can be an insightful feature for businesses that are interested in streamlining the platforms that they use as ads can be created, deployed and monitored directly through Hootsuite. What’s nice about this feature is that while it makes the process of ad creation really easy, it also gives a great deal of insights. On top of that, businesses can then have an easier way of comparing the performance of their organic content to their paid content.