Among the many avenues for marketing your business, social media has become one of the most important. Developing your brand’s presence in the digital space is essential for engaging and maintaining customers that are increasingly turning to online platforms for leisure, learning, and other pursuits.
While managing your business’s social media presence is imperative for marketing success, the time and effort involved can become tedious and frustrating. Luckily, software solutions and services have arisen to help aid these tasks. As with any marketing plan, timing is key, so solutions that help with the timing and release of social media posts across platforms are invaluable to social media marketing strategies.
Hootsuite is a social media management company that has risen in popularity due to its suite of features, including scheduling social media posts. While their popularity is well-earned, having alternatives for price and supplemental features is always valuable, so we have compiled a list of 5 alternatives to Hootsuite that can help your business schedule social media posts. Since all the services provided can help schedule social media posts, we will cover some advantages that each of them offers to make them stand out.
1) Buffer
After Hootsuite, Buffer is probably the most well-known social media management company. Like Hootsuite, their collection of tools has garnered them a lot of acclaim and adoration, with few downsides in comparison. Let’s go over some of their features, and the advantages of partnering with Buffer.
Hootsuite’s time in the industry has afforded them the resources and experience necessary to offer more power and scalability to their customers. This means that for larger businesses, Hootsuite’s tools and services suit them well. But for smaller businesses, you may get lost among the features and their interface. One great advantage of Buffer is its user experience, which is more streamlined to assist small teams.
This may be the area where Buffer really stands apart from Hootsuite, their small business accessibility. On top of the more accessible UI, their business plans are also cheaper than Hootsuite, making them a great entry-level option for smaller businesses looking for some assistance managing their social media experiences.
2) Business Intelligence’s Business Influence Tool
Business Intelligence offers a service worthy of our name, and the Business Influence Tool we provide is aimed at giving businesses everything they need to control their business presence online across all social media platforms. Beyond post-scheduling and analytical tools that can be found in our service, there are a few unique features pertaining to content creation that help Business Intelligence stand out as one of the best alternatives to Hootsuite.
A significant advantage with Business Intelligence that you may not find many other places, is our in-house social media management team. Staffed with personnel who can advise you 1 on 1 to develop a content strategy and manage posting daily to social media, the support you receive with Business Intelligence on top of the social media management tools, is what makes this service so valuable.
And speaking of value, we have also made sure to provide various tiers of price and functionality so that many different businesses and budgets can utilize quality social media management software. Bigger organizations may have more budget flexibility, but it is absolutely possible to have a fantastic social media strategy with minimal spending.
We will cover a few more alternatives to Hootsuite in this article but read on until the end to hear a bit more about Business Intelligence, and even receive a free trial offer.
3) Sendible
An important part of any marketing plan is gathering data to intelligently guide your strategy. Your team will interact with many different platforms when managing your social media presence, and a lot of data will be generated in turn. Having the right tools to gather and analyze this data is important, and Sendible makes a strong case for being among the best.
This is also what makes them a choice to contend with Hootsuite, as Sendible may have an edge when it comes to the depth of their analytics. Like most of the entries on this list, you can interact with the Sendible and Hootsuite software through a dashboard, which features convenient tools to gather data from your various social media channels, and even some to analyze them. While Hootsuite’s dashboard and data analysis tools are not weak by any means, Sendible may offer just a bit more for highly analytical teams.
Sendible’s dashboard Is highly segmented, offering many different feeds of data and lots of room to edit. You can create specific reports regarding certain metrics and schedule a regular time for your team to receive them, ensuring that your team is working with perfectly up-to-date info all the time. There is even a built-in Google Analytics area that allows you to keep track of content and see which of your initiatives are performing the best.
4) Agorapulse
Learning involves a combination of experience and education. There are a few different ways you can gain insight, and sometimes the best education comes from observing others, what works for them, and where they may fail. Having the ability to analyze your own progress is useful but being able to learn from your competitors is invaluable. With the features provided by Agorapulse, you can have this ability.
One of Agorapulse’s signature features is its competitor tracking analytics tool. With this feature, you can easily obtain the metrics of your competitors’ various social media channels and learn which of their initiatives have been successful. With tools like these, you can gain invaluable insight into how your peers in your industry proceed with their own marketing strategies.
Many of the services in this list will offer similar features and will be able to accomplish most of what a marketing team needs to manage their social media profiles. So, when it comes to choosing a specific one, it will come down to these few unique offerings that set them apart. Hootsuite offers competent service and valuable tools, but if you value that more direct competitor insight, then Agorapulse may be the stronger option for your team.
5) Sprout
With the goal of many businesses being to grow and succeed, what were once small businesses may eventually turn into medium, large, and even enterprise-level organizations. As your business expands, your capabilities will need to as well. The tools you use to get the job done will need to scale with you, and Sprout Social’s social media management suite is well-suited for these larger businesses.
In noting its usefulness for large businesses, it is important to recognize that this does mean smaller businesses may not find Sprout’s services available to them, especially because of their rather high cost for use. This high cost does correlate with high-quality tools, but for smaller businesses starting out, or with more limited budgets, acquiring Sprout’s tools will not be financially feasible.
For those businesses who can afford this premium price, expect premium features. With the capacity to support multiple accounts and multiple users across all your social platforms, Sprout Social offers a lot of flexibility and functionality for larger marketing teams looking to accommodate more collaborators and wider-scale social media marketing campaigns.
With Sprout as our last entry today, we hope that we have provided you with a good selection of alternatives to Hootsuite for managing your business’s social media presence. But before you go, we want to give you the chance to take one of them for a trial run, specifically Business Intelligence’s Business Influence Tool.
Explore your options with Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence aims to provide solutions for all manner of businesses and their needs, and this has spawned the creation of a few different packages that businesses can look towards for their specific social media management needs.
- Essentials – This package is aptly named, as it offers the essentials of Social Media Management for businesses, without too many luxury features, making it an affordable option. This package will offer analytics tracking and social media campaign management solutions and allow you to create and monitor local listings for your business.
- 360° – This package widens the offer of tools available to your team with just a small increase in price. By purchasing the 360° package, you will gain access to the digital tools necessary to manage and improve your social media footprint on virtually every major platform, including Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many more.
- Complete Social Media Management – This package goes above and beyond to provide social media assistance for businesses and offers the highest value for them all. With complete social media management, you will gain access to our in-house social media management team, who will work with you to devise and execute a social media strategy, on top of the tools available to you through our other packages. Our team will handle your posts and even create content for your marketing campaigns.
We believe that we offer the best value in social media management, and to stick to our word, we are offering the ability to access our tools and services on a trial basis. Get started with Business Intelligence here.
To book a consultation demo with our staff and learn how we will work with you to maximize your social media marketing strategy, Schedule a demo with one of our product consultants: https://www.wd-strategies.com/book-online.
We have shared a good amount of social media management solutions today, and odds are you know a few more of your own. Getting attuned to new software can be difficult, but here at Business Intelligence, we work to make our solutions as accessible as possible. Check out how easy it is to get started with the video or tutorial content:
- https://support.biz-intelligence.app/kb/en/article/how-do-i-connect-my-social-media-accounts-to-business-influence
- https://support.biz-intelligence.app/kb/en/article/how-do-i-create-posts-inside-of-business-intelligence
We hope we have been of some assistance on your social media management journey, and that one of these tools will be the difference-maker for your team.
