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Thursday, 12 August 2010

Thinking about Hootsuite alternatives

Today Hootsuite announced a freemium plan. I understand the need for a freemium model and Student Development already have a subscription with Flickr, however Hootsuite's price plan looks like it's going to be prohibitive for us.

Hootsuite has been brilliant for us in the following ways:
  • team collaboration - allowing us to have lots of people (currently we have 6) posting to multiple accounts, especially our Student Development Facebook and Twitter accounts
  • monitoring response and progress - this is a really handy feature, especially when we have so many people posting to the accounts - it helps us keep track of who's responded to what
  • statistics - the stats give us a really useful snap shot - daily clicks, referral data and, most helpfully, most popular tweets
  • scheduled posts - great for delaying posts to more appropriate times
  • assign tasks - we can even assign responses to individual team members - but we haven't used this feature much yet
All in all it's been brilliant, but at $99 per month for what we'd need (8 team members) I'm sad to say I think we're going to have to switch to something else. So does anyone have any recommendations of something that will do much of the above at less cost?
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17 comments:

  1. Andrew12 August 2010 at 12:41

    http://www.tweetdeck.com/desktop/
    http://seesmic.com/seesmic_desktop/look/

    Not sure if they do what you need, but they look fancy!

    Andrew

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  2. Stuart Johnson12 August 2010 at 12:53

    Hmmm, I don't think they support multiple users (just multiple accounts) but will check. Thanks

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  3. Stuart Johnson12 August 2010 at 13:48

    CoTweet (http://cotweet.com/) would be an option if it supported Facebook as well as Twitter, but it doesn't :(

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  4. Brian Groce12 August 2010 at 16:08

    This change is killing us as well, but so it goes with startups.

    I second taking a look at CoTweet. I don't like its setup quite as much, but the features are similar. http://cotweet.com/features

    My main complaints being limited to 5 accounts (we assist clients & it's nice to not have to log into each account) & being Twitter only (Facebook Pages would be a plus).

    I don't mind paying for an application or service, but Hootsuite has lost their mind. For what we'd need would bump us to their Enterprise platform which is cost prohibitive.

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  5. Stuart Johnson12 August 2010 at 17:32

    Thanks, Brian. I'll take a second look at CoTweet. I can't believe Hootsuite's Enterprise package - $1499 per month! You're right - they have lost their mind. I suppose I could always link our twitter account to our Facebook page but then it would be annoying for users to click through from Facebook then to Twitter then to the article. Maybe I should use CoTweet and just dish out FB page admins more liberally. Will be interested to hear what you decide to do. Thanks for the comment!

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  6. AJCann12 August 2010 at 17:35

    Well there's always account sharing, not great, but if that's all you can afford. The main problem is the number of team members rather than the number of client accounts?

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  7. Brian Groce12 August 2010 at 17:56

    No kidding! I really can't get over their emphasis on additional users. That seems as silly as a steakhouse placing and emphasis on soft drinks...eat all the steak you want but those soft drinks are going to add up.

    We've just posted about this too: http://watershedstudio.com/blog/2010/08/hootsuite...

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  8. Stuart Johnson12 August 2010 at 17:56

    It's the number of team members and CoTweet only does Twitter - not FB - I guess I could always resort to using selective Twitter status though #fb

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  9. Brian Groce12 August 2010 at 17:58

    Problem being account sharing is hard to organize. We're small but help clients run multiple accounts & for us it'd be ideal to do that in one place and know who was doing what so there's no overlap.

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  10. Derek13 September 2010 at 23:49

    Look into http://mediafunnel.com - we've got the options you're looking for.

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  11. Stuart Johnson14 September 2010 at 10:04

    I know - http://goo.gl/lqoX Looking good!

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  12. RED Brand Media11 November 2010 at 07:29

    Love Hootsuite, but the limitations and price points are not for us anymore.

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  13. Stuart Johnson11 November 2010 at 09:42

    [We're still using it with same users as registered before the freemium at no cost. Trying to keep quiet about it though]

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  14. RED Brand Media11 November 2010 at 22:28

    They give you a week to continue with more than 5 accounts, then you can carry on free if you limit your accounts to 5.

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  15. Steve Chipman19 November 2010 at 14:29

    Stu - our app supports both Twitter and Facebook and has an array of team features. We've made the pricing very reasonable for an organization of any size. http://mediafunnel.com

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  16. Stuart Johnson19 November 2010 at 14:39

    Hi Steve, thanks. We are thinking about this now that Hootsuite's pricing has finally kicked in this week - http://blog.hootsuite.com/hootsuite-plan-migration/

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  17. Ryan29 November 2010 at 19:43

    If you can’t justify $15/month per Hootsuite team member, you should check out GroupTweet.com. We obviously don’t offer all the features of Hootsuite, but GroupTweet will enable an unlimited number of team members to contribute content to a single Twitter timeline for only $5/month. You will likely need to sign up for the premium account because you won’t want all of your followers to be able to publish DM’s to your Twitter timeline. The Premium account will give you features such as Author Whitelisting or Message Moderation. You can use GroupTweet in conjunction with any Twitter client out there, ie Tweetdeck, Twitter.com or even Hootsuite’s free version!

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