Hootsuite vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

Hootsuite is a great tool and we prefer it to some of the others out there. The only negative is the price point and the fact that it keeps going up with no regard to the small non-profits that have been using it for years. After mentioning that the system is great and the fact that we can integrate and customize the posting for each social media site without having to be jumping from one system to the other makes it ideal for a small team doing multiple projects or things at the same time.

Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential

Incentivized

• The product has a really interactive media library which is very helpful even when we are out of images.
• Customer support of this tool is also very understandable and interactive due to which the experience goes very smoothly.
• It would not be wrong to say that the usability of this product is one of the greatest strengths of Hootsuite.
• With this tool modification of scheduled posts is just so simple and easy to do which yields great results as well.

Incentivized

• It's an excellent tool for collaboration. The UX is friendly and intuitive and our team loves the internal chat.
• The workflow is seamless and provides easy-to-use features for the team and leaders to do what they need to do.
• The integrated knowledge base is easy to manage, search and use.

Incentivized

• Because of the way algorithms works, we would have loved to be able to automate making a post with no link and posting the first comment with a link (hello LinkedIn)
• We would have loved an easy way to post from a main account and repost the post for other accounts we administrate, for instance a corporate post reposted by individuals for LinkedIn, or retweets from one main account by child accounts

Incentivized

• Bringing back the option to see not only who is responding to a customers post, but actually seeing the response as they are typing it out. That was a neat feature to have.
• It will timeout, which is a bit annoying sometimes but not a huge deal.

Incentivized

At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.

Incentivized

Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.

Hootsuite is probably the easiest to use social media scheduler of all the ones that I've used. It's been easy to teach clients how to use the software themselves and it can be accessed easily on anyone's phone through their mobile app. Highly recommend for anyone that wants a software that is easy to learn!

Incentivized

The system meets all my expectations.

Incentivized

Gliches have made it a bit of a bind, particularly when you just want to 'click and send' a web article after you have read it - and then you have to deal with support (a great team but not always able to solve the problems with the gliches). Gliches with it loading properly, gliches with 'double ups in FB on the posts (the personal page and the business page if both clicked will lead to 2 lots of postings to each page!)

HootSuite does everything it is designed to do very well: the product's performance is very reliable and efficient. Like other tools, there is always a room for new developments and updates, and the HootSuite team recognizes this and focuses on new development as well.

I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing!
The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still
getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help
on this

Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.

Incentivized

Very easy to teach and learn

Would rate it a 10. We received two hours of online training and it was of very high-quality. HootSuite also offers HootSuite University which is an extremely comprehensive training portal with self-paced quizzes, training webinars and videos, best-practice papers, product certification, and access to a network of external experts. This is a fantastic resource.

Simple and easy to use, and have never had any issues. We like how it saves me time and allows me to plan in advance. I plan on using this for as long as I can and will encourage others to use it too. If you haven't tried it you should. I hope my review is helpful to everyone.

Incentivized

Hootsuite offers a wide range of tools at a somewhat steeper cost. If you manage multiple platforms and want to survey the content being shared and interacted with across all of them, Hootsuite seems to have an easier platform to do that with. HubSpot CRM allows us to integrate our social platforms into our existing CRM, which is a cost saver, but Hootsuite is social media-focused, so the set-up is easier.

Incentivized

Sparkcentral is in an excellent place - they are the only true stand-alone social media customer care platform. We also provide support through Oracle RightNow (Chat/email), but the social add-on for that appeared to be weak. Hootsuite works fine for small teams of low volume customer care, but for a dedicated social care platform, we could not find anything else worth considering

It does more than I need.

Incentivized

• Hootsuite has positively improved our overall engagement of our accounts. We went from an average of a 5% engagement rate across all accounts to a 12% engagement.
• Hootsuite has positively improved our ability to target certain demographics on social media advertising through their analytics. We have seen CTR increase of 2% which is impressive for our industry.

Incentivized

• Providing customers the option to contact us via social media cuts costs for the company by lowering call in numbers and creating a more efficient way of assisting customers where they are.
• Currently there is not an option to separate outside of business hours reporting for response time and within business hours. This can cause a pain point when reporting to other departments as it calculates a higher response time than the accurate one due to outside business hours.

Incentivized