Since 2008, millions have trusted their social media accounts to Hootsuite. When it comes to managing multiple social accounts, monitoring brand or keyword mentions, and analyzing trends, few solutions can match Hootsuite’s combination of functionality and affordability.
However good the Hootsuite app may be, it’s not for everyone. Maybe you hate their points-based reporting system, dislike the discombobulated dashboard display, or perhaps you have an unreasonable fear of owls.
According to our Technology Advisors, buyers consider switching from Hootsuite to another social media management solution for a number of reasons. Some want to track and schedule all social media within their CRM and/or marketing automation platform and don’t use one of the few systems with a pre-built integration in the Hootsuite App Directory. Others may want to integrate their paid and organic campaigns in a single social media platform.
For these reasons or any other, we’ve selected this list of six business-focused Hootsuite alternatives. There are a plethora of consumer or “prosumer”-level Hootsuite alternatives for small businesses (like the ones discussed in the articles below), but enterprise-grade platforms are less common.
READ MORE:
- Hootsuite vs. Buffer: Comparing Social Media Management Software
- Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Comparing Two Social Media Standouts
Top Hootsuite Alternatives for Enterprises
Denim Social
Formerly Gremlin Social, Denim Social has long led the enterprise social media management tool space in security and regulatory compliance for banks and financial institutions. In 2014, Gremlin was endorsed by the New York Bankers Association as the recommended social media management platform for all its members, and the company has never looked back.
Like many social media management tools, Denim Social offers a single dashboard for access to all of your social accounts and posting or scheduling access in the same space. Denim Social allows posting to multiple groups and pages and builds employee engagement with approved posts users can share on their own networks. Your content library holds approved messages, branding, and images for easy access as your team schedules out your content. This means your team can differentiate your Facebook posts from those you send to your Twitter audience, tweaking your branding and message per platform and social media account.
Approval processes and restricted keywords help keep posters within the bounds of corporate branding and government regulations. Keyword filtering keeps teams from posting restricted messages, and social media monitoring keeps an eye on what your customers and competitors are posting. These key features allow you to stay in compliance while also engaging in the conversation.
Buffer for Business
Buffer is a popular Hootsuite alternative among businesses and individuals for its ease of use and automatic link shortening capabilities. Business pricing is a flat monthly fee rather than per-user cost, which comes as a relief to lots of marketing departments that spread the social duties around. You can also connect up to 150 social accounts across social networks like Facebook, Twitter and more, so the social media management tool works great for agencies. Request enterprise plans on a quote basis for building out user accounts or adding multiple accounts.
Buffer’s features include smart scheduling, which finds out when your audience is most active on your social channels and lets you schedule posts.
Use the browser extension to curate content directly from your social feeds into the scheduling tool to position your brand as a thought leader who not only produces content but also reads the landscape. Connect your RSS feed to have direct access to posts and updates within your Buffer app and curate where you schedule your content.
Access your posts and scheduling at every payment level including the free plan, but only the paid plans give you analytics and insights right in the Buffer dashboard.
Oktopost
Oktopost is a social media marketing and social media management tool aimed primarily at B2B marketers. If you are a B2B firm, Oktopost should be at or near the top of your list due to its comprehensive, revenue-focused analytics and robust LinkedIn integration.
The simplest comparison of Oktopost and Hootsuite? Hootsuite was initially designed to help businesses manage multiple Twitter accounts and handle the day-to-day scheduling. Other functions and social media networks were added as the need became apparent, but what Hootsuite is to Twitter, Oktopost is to LinkedIn. It’s purpose-built for B2B firms who source leads from LinkedIn, allowing you to track not only the results from social profiles, company, and showcase pages that you own, but also pages or profiles owned by your employees, thanks to the built-in employee advocacy tools.
With its focus on B2B, Oktopost can, of course, schedule updates for LinkedIn profiles and company or showcase pages, but it also manages publishing to Facebook profiles and company or group pages, Twitter handles, and Google+ business pages. Linking profiles to your Oktopost account is quick and easy — see their knowledge base entry here.
Like Hootsuite, Oktopost offers the ability to monitor brand or keyword mentions across social platforms via their “Streams” interface, but it also allows you to track replies to your social media posts or comments, sending them to the “Social Inbox,” where you can craft your response directly within Oktopost. You can also monitor mentions of terms within LinkedIn groups of which you’re a member, allowing you to easily engage when and where appropriate.
Oktopost offers unlimited reports (unlike Hootsuite’s points system) and pre-built integrations with Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua, Act-On, and many other sales/marketing platforms. Using the built-in analytics features, you can track both destination conversions (when a user reaches a particular webpage) and event conversions (when a user conducts a specified action, such as watching a video).
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a professional-grade social media posting, social listening, and engagement tool for companies. Enjoy the standard features of a social inbox, scheduling posts and drafting social media posts, social media presence monitoring, and paid post management with reporting that can drill down to a single post or include entire groups.
Sprout Social has invested in agency and enterprise-grade tools like inbox workflows that help promote enterprise team collaboration to manage social mentions and messages quickly. Inbox notifications will keep social team members apprised of increased traffic, so they can respond to changing social conditions.
Users of Sprout Social will benefit from upgraded accounts that bring in automation, tagging, and custom settings that make reporting, trend analysis, and integrations with CRM or other reporting software fast and easy.
Unlike many of the other options on this list, however, Sprout Social’s pricing plan does not offer a free plan, although you can take advantage of a free trial of the tools. And the number of included connected accounts tops out at 10 with this social media tool, but more accounts can be purchased for a monthly fee without increasing the paid plan you’re on.
Social Champ
Social Champ is an agency and enterprise social media management software that boasts connections to Pinterest, bulk social media scheduling to all multiple channels including Facebook and Google My Business, and powerful content curation features to boost your social profiles. The team management tools let you assign various roles that can be integrated into workflows to speed up your approvals processes and ensure that your accounts are securely managed.
The sentiment analysis tools included in Social Champ can help your team understand your audience, build a sustainable marketing strategy, and react quickly to the changing tide of your audience. React quickly from the Chrome extension, which lets you share photos, videos, and posts from any website directly to your accounts.
Social Champ outperforms many of the other Hootsuite competitors on this list based on the number of accounts you can connect. The Agency paid plan includes 100 accounts with 2000 scheduled posts per account, which significantly outstrips the 35+ accounts you can get from the Hootsuite enterprise account. And the relatively inexpensive Professional plan connects 15 social accounts, which may be enough for enterprise companies with a smaller social presence.
Social Pilot
Social Pilot is an agency and enterprise-grade social media management software that makes a good Hootsuite alternative due to price and the number of social accounts you can connect. In addition to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, Social Pilot also includes connections to Google My Business and TikTok. Read and respond to direct messages and mentions from multiple channels via a centralized social inbox.
Agencies and enterprise companies looking to report on all social media posts will enjoy that the analytics tools will report on all posts, whether or not they were scheduled through Social Pilot’s tools. And the agency plans lets you white label your reporting, meaning that your agency can add your own branding to reporting and mask the tooling that helps you provide such deep insights. Unfortunately Social Pilot does not yet have analytics for TikTok, but will provide analytics for other connected accounts.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
If you’re looking for Hootsuite alternatives because you want to build a single-platform marketing solution, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud should be one of the first options you consider. If you’re already using Salesforce CRM and/or Pardot, then it’s likely the only option you should consider.
With cross-channel functionality including mobile, email, social, retargeting, and much more, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is the system-of-record for some of the world’s most respected brands.
Offered in four main editions — Email/Mobile/Web Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Advertising, and B2B Marketing Automation — Marketing Cloud has a solution for almost every use case. For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the Social Media Marketing edition, since it compares most favorably with Hootsuite.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to schedule posts across multiple networks, including LinkedIn social media profiles and company pages, Twitter accounts, Facebook profiles, pages, and groups, Google+ pages, Pinterest boards, Instagram, and YouTube. You can easily build and apply publishing macros, helping automate repetitive tasks, delegate posts to other users, and even access an audit trail for engagement, which helps you paint a more accurate picture of how a particular post performs based on specific user interactions.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is tightly integrated with other Salesforce products, including Service Cloud, Pardot, and Salesforce CRM, but it also offers some of the best two-way integration with social networks available, including the ability to like, favorite, quote, retweet, or share social posts on various networks from directly within the platform, follow/unfollow users, and track private messages sent via Facebook or Twitter.
Khoros
Khoros is trusted by some of the world’s largest companies to simplify and amplify their social media marketing. The company enjoys preferred/strategic partner status with all the major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ — even Tumblr, Foursquare, SlideShare, and others.
Khoros is offered in three editions: Social Marketing, Experiences, and Intelligence. This segmentation has both positives and negatives. If you’re looking to use Khoros as a comprehensive digital marketing platform, you’ll need to purchase all three products. However, if you’re like most businesses and already use one or more marketing software tools, you won’t have to purchase a redundant product. This is especially true thanks to the open nature of the Khoros platform; they offer pre-built integration with a wide variety of platforms and/or services, including CRMs, link shortening, web analytics, and others. See the full list here.
You’ll find social media scheduling tools and profile monitoring features in all four versions of Khoros, which makes it somewhat confusing to choose between them. That said, the Social Marketing product seems to include the most functionality. With Social Marketing, you can schedule posts and publish them to all the major social networks (including LinkedIn company pages), respond to incoming social conversations, or monitor basic sentiment and brand mentions on major networks.
The Khoros platform is a full customer experience platform that adds SMS marketing, email, messaging, chat, and more through owned properties and social media channels. Khoros can be expensive, depending on the number of seats you purchase and which version(s) you select. But, as you can see, it’s no slouch for features.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr is trusted by more than 1,000 of the world’s largest consumer brands to manage or track all parts of the customer experience. With over 20 social channels (including the basics like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) and more than 85 languages supported, Sprinklr is the first choice for many globally-focused businesses.
Unlike the previous products discussed, Sprinklr offers a unified customer experience marketing (CXM) platform, which includes basic functionality for content and campaign management, planning, and publishing, audience segmentation and engagement tracking, approvals and policy management, reporting, and even an easy-to-use mobile application that helps you manage your campaigns when you’re away from the office.
Customer analytics and sentiment analysis within the CXM platform helps marketing teams make data-informed decisions based on actual customer feedback, instead of gut feeling. Automated workflows and approvals, smart bidding, and AI-automated campaign optimizations will speed up the social media manager’s work and help them scale campaigns.
The customer experience platform connects directly to your CRM to make for more targeted experiences based on audience insights. And integrations with over 30 data sources will help you build targeted campaigns that make sense with your marketing.
Choosing the best Hootsuite competitor
If you’re looking for a social media marketing solution that surpasses Hootsuite, these six options above are a good place to start. To see more options, check out our Social Media Marketing Product Selection Tool, or talk to one of our unbiased Technology Advisors for a free consultation based on your requirements.
