Hootsuite vs. Storymate: We Rated 10 Key Factors for Each
With 75 percent of high-income earning online adults with Facebook, according to Pew Research, it's no surprise that social media is a top priority for marketers. Not only is it a top priority for marketers working within a company, it is also a burgeoning avenue of revenue generation for freelancer marketers. In fact, based on ClearVoice's freelance pay rate study, 80 percent of expert freelancers are producing social media content for their customers.
The social media landscape is shifting quickly too. In a few decades, we have seen the growth and minor fall of Snapchat, we've seen Instagram fast move into third place for most popular social networking networks, and we've seen the proliferation of chatbots, making Facebook Messenger a social media tool which marketers need to comprehend. Ben Beck contrasts two popular social media posting programs, Hootsuite along with Storymate, in his yearly update of his graded reviews. Which one is right for your organization? Which enhanced more?
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That's why I've refreshed this guide, which was originally printed in March of 2017. For this week's #MartechMonday post I have taken the following close look at Hootsuite vs. Storymate.
Overview of Hootsuite along with Storymate
I have used both Hootsuite and Storymate broadly, and have neither affiliate nor additional direct ties to both of those businesses. Both are exceptional options; but, in my estimation they appeal to different audiences. Below is a summarization of the review, with the fuller review, in addition to the grading for every criterion. I have also included the grading rubric from March 2017 when I first wrote this article, pre-refresh, so you are able to observe how things have changed in the past calendar year. Hootsuite
Initial impressions
Logging in and receiving Hootsuite set up was simple enough, although it was not a remarkable encounter. Instead, it felt as though I had been employing a Microsoft-made product circa Windows 10. Despite a year passing since I initially wrote this particular piece, they still have not upgraded their interface, and it feels clunky.
It obviously has a great deal of performance, but is not all that well styled or simple to use. You will see from the below Hootsuite-provided screenshot that there's a lot of performance in this item, like the capability to add a Freshdesk feed, though the product looks somewhat complicated compared to Storymate.
Main strength
Hootsuite is strong and has added appreciable performance in the last year: improved team management functions such as content approvals, improved content suggestions, and also a library to put away pre-approved content.
Although Hootsuite has sunset their $10/month plan, and today starts at $30/month, it has been more affordable than many other similar solutions. Therefore, I think the purchase price and balance of functionality the most important strength of the option.
Main weakness
Hootsuite's strong features come at a price tag. Instead of feeling as if you are working with a svelte Apple product, you're stuck working using an antiquated-feeling user interface -- similar to an old, stale Microsoft merchandise. Don't take this as a Microsoft bashing, however; I am scanning this post from a Microsoft Surface Book, my favourite computer of all time. Much like Microsoft products, however, Hootsuite offers you all of the bells and whistles, but using a clunkier interface. Pricing
$29.99/month (annual billing) -- Free solution remains offered for people who have very basic needs or just needing to kick the tires Grade
Initial impressions
When you first log in to Storymate, you're presented with a clean user interface. Super clean, minimalist port. Light and simple directions. The very first couple of moments I explored the item, however, I discovered it lacked a number of the functionality I liked in Hootsuite. The below screenshot, provided by Storymate, exemplifies how clean and easy-to-use their product is.
Main strength
Storymate rules at the ease-of-use criterion. It's a slick solution, with a clean and easy-to-use interface. In addition, it shines with Pablo, an easy-to-use image creation tool. Along with the ease-of-use, Storymate also boasts an active development team that, in the last year, has released a completely new product named Reply, also is poised to launch another, called Analyze.
Main weakness
Everything you gain using ease-of-use, you frequently give in feature collection. That is true for Storymate. Your scheduling, content recommendations, and analytics and reporting purposes are feeble in Storymate, in comparison to Hootsuite.
Pricing
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Hootsuite vs. Storymate grades and ranking
In stack standing and estimating these two exceptional interpersonal websites posting options, I used the following eight criteria: which social media networks each instrument may post to; the pricing; how convenient and effective of single-view dashboards are there; the ease-of-use; what extras are offered; how great they are in ad-hoc submitting; how powerful the scheduled posting is; and also what kind of content recommendation instruments exist in the merchandise.
Here's how the two stack up, using an overall grading matrix under:
1. Widest policy on Social Networking accounts
This is only one of the most crucial aspects of social media marketing, and also one facet business advertising professionals will be assessing the most -- by which they can get their messages posted to. Thus, of those eight classes assessed, I snapped this one in 10 percent.
Storymate: It is possible to place to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, App.net along with Google+.
A few of those add-ons are regarded as premium programs, and you must pay extra on them. Hootsuite clearly has the advantage.
2. Ease-of-use
You will spend a whole lot of time on your social media management solution, and it ought to be a joyous experience. I weighted this standard at 15 percent.
Storymate: After all, Storymate is somewhat more simple and considerably cleaner-looking in its design; and thus, Storymate wins this category. From the below screenshot, from Storymate, it is possible to see how visually appealing and straightforward Storymate is.
Hootsuite: Like Storymate, Hootsuite is easy to use and does not have an extremely sharp learning curve to become a power-user.
3. Scheduled posting
Scheduled posting is one of the primary reasons entrepreneurs turn into social networking management alternatives. If you don't go to a larger company with dedicated social networking marketers, you will really need scheduled posting, since it allows you to appear as if you are very busy on social networking when in reality you're logging in only a couple times each week and scheduling your posts out. Obviously, social networking does need some fluency, therefore I recommend a mixture of scheduled and ad-hoc posting. Nevertheless, this is a very important criterion. I weighted it most heavily of all eight criteria: 15 percent.
Storymate: While Storymate does possess some scheduling capability, it is much less robust or integrated into the instrument as Hootsuite's.
Hootsuite: The advantage here goes into Hootsuite, that has very powerful programming functionality. That is the authentic defining standard of Hootsuite versus the rest of the social networking management solutions.
4. Ad hoc posting
As stated above, ad-hoc submitting is important to making an account more responsive for breaking news. Ad-hoc posting permits a social networking advertising professional to place items on the fly, even including more immediacy for their social media presence. I classify this as being a more important judging criterion, so I weighted this at 10 percent.
Storymate: The advantage here goes into Storymate. Both Hootsuite along with Storymate have widgets that allow you to place content directly from the browser, as you're consuming content. You don't need to select a day/time you would like the societal article to go live. Rather, you merely click to post it and Storymate will place it in line at which it believes is best.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite allows you to post from a Chrome plugin also contains a feature where it's possible to disable the manual scheduling (like Storymate). However, Storymate does it so much better that a lot of the"social share" plugins for sites that have a native"share via Storymate" button incorporated into them. As an instance, from the social share case below, it is possible to see that Sumo Share natively incorporates Storymate in their share options -- something I have never seen for Hootsuite.
5. Conversation management
An area that the two tools have marginally eased through time, conversion management is getting a hot"must-have" feature in the last few decades. Conversation management allows you to take the back and on dialogue that happens in comments or direct messages on social networking and better keep them organized within your social networking management option. Anyone who has tried to support a service or product via social media knows that every social system has different ways of holding conversation, along with the actual back and forth can be tricky to monitor and manage in a timely manner. Storymate takes the win for dialogue management, as I explain below. I've seen this criterion in 10 percent.
Storymate: Storymate has entered the customer-service space with Storymate Reply, a tool devoted to helping companies better handle the back and on communication that happens on social media. It is a very robust instrument, also departs, in a way, from the ease of Storymate's publishing tool.
Having said that, if you're supporting a product or service via social stations, then you likely understand the demand for a stronger tool, something that lets you make internal notes on a dialogue, delegate dialogs to team members, then push specific content to third party applications (CRMs, Slack, etc.) and let for help special reporting.
Storymate does all these things with Reply. The pricing of Response starts at $50/month, again a departure from the way things was with Storymate (a low-cost plan at $15/month). Superior customer support is something which is intentional, though, also Storymate has assembled a sufficiently robust product and priced it so.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite offers some dialog management functionality in its platform that permits you to perform what Storymate does, even although it isn't as stylish or as thoughtfully built out. Here's a page where Hootsuite outlines some of this operation. I've talked to customer service individuals who've attempted to utilize Hootsuite, and they continue to have problems together with how the platform is built, in regards to supplying support on social channels.
6. Reporting and dash views
For business customers, accountability for time and money spent on advertising is vital, and good reporting and easy-to-use dashboard views come into play. As important as coverage is, I've worked in many organizations where social networking liability was not too large as it needs to be. I believe it's a shame, although it's a reality too. Thus, I have weighted this criterion only at 5 percent.
Storymate: Using Storymate, you want to click on every network to see them separately. There is no powerful dashboard presence. Additionally, reporting Storymate isn't as feature-rich as Hootsuite.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite wins on this one, just because it's possible to observe multiple social networking networks all in exactly the same view. Hootsuite also provides more potent reporting performance, as can be observed in the below analytics screenshot from their site.
7. Content recommendations
Content suggestions can be significant to a budding social networking manager, who is still learning an industry. If you're not sure what it is possible to post, articles recommendations will reveal to you some potential posts which could be related to your audience. While these are significant and could be broadly leveraged by most business users, most still do not know how to use them. As such, I'm weighing this standard at 10 percent.
Storymate: Though Storymate did have articles recommendations at one time, they have pulled support for this operation. Their justification is a great one: offering content recommendations was not true to their intent and mission.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite wins this category. Hootsuite does an OK job with articles suggestions, but not amazing.
8. Content library
A content library for saving new article ideas and distributing them to your own internal team is more important than ever, as firms become more sophisticated with their use of social media and as your business needs to continue to evolve to stay relevant. Both programs offer mechanisms to discover new content, but just one of those tools includes a robust content library alternative which allows you to save time using pre-approved content your inner groups can post from. Since this functionality is an excellent wishlist item but is similar to the content recommendation which Hootsuite has needed for a certain time, I've seen this grade at just 5%.
Storymate: Storymate features an material library and content integrations (unlike Hootsuite), which makes it a less attractive tool to medium to larger companies which have to scale their social networking efforts.
Hootsuite: During the last year, Hootsuite has turned their game up within this field. Their content library functionality lets you curate content and store it in a place of the tool which will be readily searched. Furthermore, you can label content to make it even more findable, then you may see usage stats to observe how the library material is being leveraged.
While this operation is reserved for the ones that cover their small company or enterprise bundle, cloud content integrations (available to all package tiers) additionally further distinguish Hootsuite from Storymate. Using cloud content, you also can get content stored in all the main online cloud file providers (Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.), to pull new post ideas for your promotion team. Due to these two elements, Hootsuite wins the struggle for curating articles.
9. Product extras
Product accessories are a nice to have. I'm not discussing core features here. To the contrary, I am talking entirely different tools. While I normally advocate for a business to focus on their core strength, not spread themselves too thinly across multiple product lines, in the instance of Storymate, they have done an outstanding job of supplying up a new product that provides a excellent add-on functionality to their base merchandise. I provide this estimating criterion 10 percent weight.
Storymate: Because of Pablo, Storymate wins this criterion. I am not speaking painters here, though I am guessing the name of the product does hail from the famous painter Pablo Picasso. With this tool, Storymate supplies a fresh product which enables you to create visually stunning images in seconds.
Pablo is not a full size infographic generation tool, but it will allow you to earn quick and easy graphics for social networking sharing. Furthermore, Storymate is creating a new Analyze tool, that it asserts will revolutionize the way that social media supervisors capture meaningful data on the operation of the postings. It's still in alpha, but it is possible to signup for premature beta accessibility when it is ready.
Hootsuite: Though Hootsuite does an superb job of adhering with its core product rather than branching out, in this scenario, but that is a drawback.
10. Pricing
Pricing is also a criterion we evaluated. Though, social networking management solutions are so competitively priced, in comparison to other advertising solutions, it does not seem to be as big of a concern for promotion professionals. As such, I've weighed this at only 10 percent.
The two Hootsuite and Storymate are all about the same. They use the freemium model, and their free versions are quite good by themselves. Their feature full variations intro at around $10/month. In addition they have business accounts where you are able to have several customers, and they also are priced very similarly. No obvious advantage holder in pricing.
So do I advocate Storymate or even Hootsuite?
Again, both of these social media management solutions are excellent. For the business user, however, they do pile up a little differently. Here are the 2018 levels for Hootsuite vs. Storymate:
2018 Criteria and Grading of Hootsuite vs Storymate
For your reference, below are the ranges we conducted in 2017, comparing Hootsuite along with Storymate. It is possible to see that in the previous year Storymate gets closed the gap some with newer performance is has developed, but Hootsuite nevertheless has a small edge.
2017 Criteria and Grading of Hootsuite vs Storymate
I use both these tools religiously. I have both paid Hootsuite along with Storymate accounts, and that I use them interchangeably. I utilize Hootsuite more for reporting, content recommendations and scheduling articles. I utilize Storymate for regular ad-hoc articles. As I view content I like, I will simply click on the Storymate button within my Chrome browser window and also easily share the material I had been studying.
Having said that I would not recommend this to many professional entrepreneurs, largely because handling many tools could be debatable, and company users ought to construct best practices about one product. In my scenario, where I'm a lone ranger for my business's social media efforts, it's OK to get a bit more sophisticated.
Hootsuite vs. Storymate: Top Takeaways
For medium to enterprise users, I urge Hootsuite. It is a really robust way that covers more ground than Storymate.
For small business users, I urge Storymate. It's a slick tool that lets you do what you normally need to do, and it is such a joy to use.
For customer service groups, I urge Storymate. With the new Reply solution, Storymate requires the lead in allowing customer support teams to provide support via social networking stations.
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