Sprout Social vs Hootsuite – Social Media Marketing Tool Comparison

Social marketing can take up a lot of time, and time is precious, so it only makes sense to use integrated tools to monitor and manage your social marketing campaign.  There are many benefits to engaging in social marketing, including the opportunity to find new customers and build your brand through word of mouth.  Monitoring social media is a business building task, but it is also a preventative measure that allows you to manage your brand through knowing about media mentions and being given the chance to respond to them before negative word of mouth ruins your brand and crisis management comes into play.                                          

When it comes to social media monitoring and management, there are several tools to make it easier and less time consuming but learning them all to identify which is best for you can be quite a task.  Comparisons are useful for discovering what they are all about.  Reviewing the basic features will help you to decide which one fits best into your business goals and which will be most useful.

SproutSocial and HootSuite are two of the popular monitoring and management tools for social media.  They each produce valuable information, but choosing which is best depends a lot on how you intend to use it.  Let’s start off by comparing the features…

Common Features

Both SproutSocial and HootSuite enable you to monitor multiple networks from one dashboard.  They both have analytic capabilities and permit the customization of reports as well as containing automated reports.  They both track demographic information about your followers which is useful to target marketing, and they both include Twitter contact details. 

SproutSocial and HootSuite include the opportunity for tracking mentions which is helpful in monitoring your brand and engaging in conversations with potential customers or critics.  They both have search features that allow you to find new customers through social media as well as enabling the smart move of monitoring your competition.  Both tools have a scheduler that allows you to schedule messages to post at a certain time and both have the capability of managing RSS feeds.  

What is Different? 

While both SproutSocial and HootSuite are useful tools for managing social media activities, HootSuite has the capability of managing a team making it the best choice if you use, or intend to use, multiple contributors to your social profiles.  This feature allows you to assign individual passwords instead of sharing them as well as limiting the activities that the team members engage in. 

HootSuite’s secure profiles prevent erroneous postings to secured profiles which is essential when working with multiple contributors. The assignment feature of HootSuite makes it possible for you to delegate tasks to team members and provides follow-up capabilities through a message system.  This saves time and money as well as making your responses to opportunities or threats more efficient. 

HootSuite also supports mobile apps that enable access on the go which is essential to the busy entrepreneur.  It also offers themes so that spending time on the dashboard won’t get so boring.  You can liven it up a little bit by changing themes from time to time. 

These are features that SproutSocial does not have.  SproutSocial is adequate in monitoring and managing social media.  However, if multiple contributors are involved in your social media efforts, HootSuite is the best choice. 

Never underestimate the affect that social media has on your business or brand.  Honestly, it can make or break you.  Monitoring and managing social media is essential to make the most out of the benefits and to effectively control the detriments of being in the spotlight.  

What tool do you prefer for social media management? Let us know by commenting on this article!