To find the advantages of one software over another, you have to look at how they execute their functions. Which solution has the most streamlined publishing? The more in-depth reporting?

Also read: Buffer vs. Hootsuite

To help you answer those questions for yourself, we’ll compare Sprout Social and Hootsuite based on dashboards, publishing, scheduling, collaboration, reporting, and integration capabilities. If you want to save time on research, use our Social Media Marketing Product Selection Tool to get a free shortlist of social media management software recommendations. We’ll ask you a few questions and then send you suggestions tailored to your needs.

Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Company overview

Founded in 2010, Sprout Social was built to help businesses and customers communicate more freely. In the six years since its inception, the company has raised over $100 million in venture capital and filed to go public in 2019.

Sprout Social was designed to give businesses an array of functionality while keeping the user experience inviting. Notable customers include Subaru, Ticketmaster, and Evernote.

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Hootsuite was founded in 2008 under the moniker BrightKit. Its mission was simple: help businesses manage their social media accounts in one place. BrightKit eventually became Hootsuite, and the company now has 18 million users, over 1,400 employees, and offices in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Mexico City, London, Paris, Hamburg, Sydney, and more.

Notable Hootsuite customers include Marketo, Mailchimp, SXSW, and GE.

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Side-by-side comparison of Hootsuite and SproutSocial

Product	Bulk Scheduling	Platform Certification & Training	Social CRM	Chatbots	Optimize Send Times
Hootsuite
Sprout Social

Feed dashboards

Any true social media management tool will aggregate posts from multiple networks. The way the platform displays this information has a significant impact on usability.

Both Hootsuite and Sprout Social aggregate posts in a feed, but the way each product displays the feed is substantially different.

Hootsuite (pictured below) lets users build adjacent feeds across a single dashboard and customize the type of information that each feed displays. That means you can set up a feed for each of your social accounts and create more specific filters on each of those accounts — e.g., posts from Facebook or incoming tweets.

Once you have your feeds set up, you can interact with the content displayed in each one directly from Hootsuite, which makes responding to questions and comments across multiple networks a breeze.

Sprout Social (pictured below) forgoes the multi-columnar approach of its competitor and instead aggregates posts into a single feed. You can customize the information in the feed by checking and unchecking filters, and you can also move to a network-specific view (for example, everything from LinkedIn) with one click. One cool feature of Feeds in Sprout Social is that you can also add RSS feeds to help with sourcing content to share.

Like Hootsuite, Sprout Social lets you interact with and respond to messages directly from your feed. It also tracks which messages have been responded to and marks them with a green icon to prevent multiple users from responding to the same message. This is a minor feature, but it makes collaboration among team members much less complicated.

Publishing and scheduling

There isn’t much difference in the publishing functionality of these two platforms. Both allow you to compose a message, choose which account it comes from, attach photos, shorten links, and choose a target audience from the main feed dashboard.

Both products also offer a draft function, so you can save posts that aren’t ready for publication and return to them later. Hootsuite lets you schedule up to 50 posts at once by uploading a CSV file using the bulk schedule tool.

Sprout Social offers some extra data in the publishing department with its audience discovery function, which highlights people or accounts you should follow and spam or bot accounts you should probably unfollow. This is especially helpful for identifying relevant influencers.

Sprout Social also shows a brief history of your conversation with someone on Twitter if you’re about to respond to their message. It pulls this data from its social CRM functionality, which is covered in more detail in the Extras section below.

For scheduling, Hootsuite and Sprout Social both offer a content calendar so you can schedule posts ahead of time. If you want to automate your posts, each system can choose posting times for you.

Both platforms also use a proprietary algorithm to decide which times you should post to elicit the most engagement from your audience.

Collaboration

Collaboration in the context of social media software mostly refers to permission settings and publishing approval rules.

Hootsuite lets you assign users one of three roles: super admin, admin, and default. If you want to manage employee Hootsuite accounts, you can apply one of the three permission settings to an entire team. Additional collaboration features in Hootsuite include the ability to assign social media replies to team members. This helps to prevent awkward situations like accidentally responding to customers twice.

Sprout Social offers similar administrative functionality, with permissions set based on a user’s role and multi-step publishing approval. Users can also tag any post in the feed as a task and assign it to a person or team.

Tasks are divided into three types: general, sales lead, and support. You can view open and completed tasks under the Task tab.

To ensure two people don’t reply to the same post in the feed view, Sprout Social will show when another user is responding to the post. For larger social teams, this feature can save a lot of time and prevent awkward double responses.

Reporting

Hootsuite’s overview report divides your social accounts into four views: posts, followers, engagement, and metrics. This provides a broad view of your social channels’ performance, but the system also lets users dig into the minutiae of social data points. Hootsuite lets you create custom reports, which you can then export to PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, or CSV files.

One helpful feature is the chart showing which days and times your posts are getting the most impressions and engagement. This optimizes your post times to drive more traffic. Additionally, the ROI report highlights the impact your social media campaigns have on leads and sales.

With Sprout Social, you can dive into engagement on a single platform, or compare how your posts are performing across all of your social media accounts. Competitor reports help you identify new opportunities for engagement by comparing your social accounts with theirs. The filters and queries also let you create your own custom reports, so you can compare your fall social campaign against the revenue numbers for that period.

Sprout Social also includes a social listening feature as an add-on that tracks mentions of your brand across the web and pulls them into a single dashboard for review. With awareness of your customers’ feelings, you can add, subtract, or alter products or services to meet their needs.

How Do Sprout Social and Hootsuite’s Pricing Models Compare?

Hootsuite offers four pricing tiers to help you find the right option for your business. The lowest tier only allows one user and is great for small businesses. The base plan lets you schedule multiple posts in advance for up to 10 accounts, offers access to free app integrations, and has a social inbox to respond to customers.

However, the basic package caps your post boost spend at $500, and you won’t get access to advanced features like customizable reports or a content library. At the top two tiers, you also get access to special add-ons, like social listening and ad campaign management.

Sprout Social offers three pricing levels, but rather than including a certain number of users, they charge per user per month. For larger teams, this could get cost-prohibitive quickly. The basic platform offers scheduling for up to five social accounts along with a social CRM and review management to read and respond to customer reviews.

For competitor reports, optimal send time scheduling, and advanced reports, you’ll need to upgrade to a higher package. Add-ons are available at any plan level and include social listening and premium analytics.

Integrations and extras

Hootsuite has an upper hand in the area of third-party integration.

Hootsuite integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. They also have an app directory stocked with over 150 native integrations — 127 of which are free.

As an extra, Hootsuite users can make a landing page and run social contests and giveaways using the Campaigns function.

Sprout Social is compatible with the major networks mentioned above and provides native connectors for Zendesk, Uservoice, Google Analytics, Feedly, HubSpot, and TripAdvisor.

What Sprout Social lacks in integrations, it makes up for in extras — namely, its social CRM. For every account that follows you or that you follow, Sprout Social creates a record that stores interaction history as well as basic contact information. This information can be immensely helpful for salespeople, another way to build marketing and sales alignment.

Should You Choose Sprout Social or Hootsuite?

Sprout Social and Hootsuite both license their products in tiered subscription models. Higher tiers are more expensive, but they also unlock more functionality and the ability to track more accounts.

From a design perspective, Sprout Social is much easier to look at and use. Hootsuite favors function over form. Hootsuite has the edge in reporting, though Sprout Social offers more extras, like social CRM and audience discovery.

In the end, it depends on what you’re looking for. Both solutions are excellent tools for managing your social media, but the difference lies in which capabilities are most important to your organization.

If you’re having trouble deciding, re-examine your requirements. Then use our Social Media Marketing Buyers Guide to get a free list of personalized vendor recommendations.

Top CRM Software Recommendations

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The massive data collected by a social CRM can be used to personalize an individual’s experience, even as it reveals trends, influencers, moments of buying intent, and decision motivations that companies can use to market and sell more effectively on a large scale.

Lots of CRMs connect to social media and help you build your social database. You can find reviews and recommendations for the perfect social media CRM by using our CRM Product Selection Tool or clicking the image below to get started.

1. Understand that social CRM data is as much about what you hear and as what you’re told.

Collecting the social data from prospects and customers who are in direct contact with your company via social media, email, or messaging is the easier part of social CRM data collection. Yet if you don’t actively listen and harvest relevant data from social media conversations that don’t directly tag your company or use your company name, you’re ignoring a huge chunk of valuable data.

Use social listening tools to hear what people have to say about your industry, and use those to help direct how you build, position and sell your own products or services. Your social CRM database is incomplete without collecting this sort of data that provides a greater context for your analysis.

2. Be selective about your data sources and your data.

Social media platforms and preferences constantly grow and evolve according to their users. You don’t need to climb every data mountain just because it’s there. That’s too much data, and it can quickly get out of your control. Be strategic about what data sources and data points have value for your business and focus on collecting those.

When you choose your data selectively, you no longer need to harvest data from every social media platform. Pay attention to those platforms that have a sufficient volume of statistically relevant data for your business. Take the same approach to filtering what data you collect: use filters to narrow the data pool by geographically or spending level criteria (for example).

3. Have a use plan for your data.

Specify what questions you want answered and what issues you want to learn about before you start collecting your data. Set use goals for what you want to get out of mining your social CRM data. Do you want to find influencers who will broaden your prospect pool? Do you want to identify more quickly and more accurately when prospects or current customers are ready to buy, and shorten your sales cycle? Increase the lifetime value of your customers?

Don’t collect the data that’s easiest to get just because you can get it. Clarify the business purpose first, which lets you specify the data that can help you achieve it.

4. Set standards for clean data and how quickly it can get processed.

Make your standards mutually agreeable: the business unit end-users of different types of data and IT teams responsible for collecting and cleaning it should set these standards together. You can take an service-level agreement (SLA) approach, which requires both sides to agree upon terms.

A collaborative approach to setting data use standards helps IT understand the sense of urgency on the business side, while helping the business side appreciate the time needed for implementation and the need for clean data. It won’t fully eliminate the tension of a big shared project and expect for the standards to shift as the business needs and technology to support them do. But having clear, accepted data cleaning and use procedures and standards will keep it to a manageable minimum.

5. Figure out how you’re going to capture and structure unstructured data.

Allowing unstructured data to slip through your hands isn’t even an option anymore. Social media conversations have always been unstructured compared to other digital text, and therefore difficult to parse. We’ve always been able to quantify social media actions like following, sharing, volume of comments, or how often a hashtag or keyword is used. However, these kinds of quantifiable actions don’t give a full picture of what’s happening on social media.

Traditional, quantifiable social metrics don’t offer insight into the attitude or sentiment of a social post or customer conversation with a chatbot. And these metrics completely overlook nontextual sharing on social media, like emojis, images, videos and audio clips. You need this unstructured data to get a more accurate picture of tribe motivations, opinions, and interests, which can then be used to more accurately identify the most valuable prospects, those who are ready to buy, and customers you may be close to losing.

6. Learn how to benefit from machine learning to glean insights.

Sometimes, we don’t even know what questions to ask. More social CRM and related tools are building artificial intelligence functions and services that analyze your terabytes of data to find the trends and insights that we poor humans simply don’t have the analytical capacity to process. AI tools can be used to analyze natural language (see point #5, above), identify conditions that are good predictors of a customer about to become very unhappy and very vocal, and uncover sales and prospecting opportunities.

The data itself doesn’t matter if companies can’t manage how it’s collected, validated and used. Without getting your social CRM database house in order, you’re both missing and misreading valuable insights. That’s frustrating and expensive, if not potentially deadly.

Ready for your CRM to collect social media data? Use our Customer Relationship Management Product Selection Tool or contact us and a Technology Advisor will provide you with custom recommendations in 5 minutes or less.

Elisa Silverman is a TechnologyAdvice contributor who follows these simple principles when writing: Never waste the reader’s time. Always be relevant — or at least be interesting. She’s been freelance writing for eight years, after spending years working in the technology and legal fields. You can connect with Elisa at www.elisasilverman.com.

Top CRM Software Recommendations

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We are in the “Age of the Customer” as Forrester Analyst Zach Hofer-Shall says in his Forbes article, “The Social Arms Race Heats Up.” Through the constant conversation that is social media, consumers have taken the ball from marketers and started a new game, in a new arena, where they share opinions and insights with people they know and trust.

CRM expert and author Paul Greenberg put it this way: “Since [the advent of facebook], ‘someone like me‘ is the most trusted source.”

If they have a Twitter account, your customer is no longer simply a buyer or a non-buyer; they’re a megaphone of good or bad publicity — someone whose feelings have more weight because their social media pages have hundreds of followers, connections, and readers.

As the power shifts from companies to their customers, salespeople (and marketers) are realizing that the traditional CRM approach is no longer sufficient. It’s part of the process, but it needs something else. Companies need a way to invite themselves into the conversation when it concerns their brand and meet customers on their level. Such an approach can help companies preempt customer service calls, avoid negative online reviews, and even recognize potential leads before other competitors.

Characteristics of Social CRM

This is where Social CRM comes in. Social CRM is a strategy that involves the fusion of existing CRM practices with new social media features. The result is often better customer engagement. This approach usually relies on a “social CRM” application with the following tools:

• “Listening” tools that monitor customer sentiment through comments, posts, etc.
• Tethering of social media to back-end systems for real-time customer service
• Monitoring of competitor’s activities and mentions
• Automated alerts that suggest follow-up activities and engagement opportunities
• Incorporation of social interaction history into customer profiles
• Geotargeting search functions for accessing specific markets based on location

Some of the leading CRM platforms, such as Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce offer their own Social CRM add-ons, but there are also independent applications available from vendors like Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

Give the People What They Want

Choosing the right technology isn’t the only factor in implementing a successful Social CRM policy. It’s important to remember that Social CRM is a customer engagement strategy, meaning your approach should be customer-centric.

When you meet the customer on his/her own turf, your marketing and sales agendas shouldn’t disappear, but they do become second priority. Greenberg calls this, “The company’s response to the customer’s control of the conversation.” In other words, you need to know what customers are seeking when they talk about and interact with brands through social media.

Many executives assume that consumers follow their companies via social sites to feel connected and engage with their brand, but this usually isn’t the case.“50 percent don’t even consider connecting with businesses” A 2011 Social CRM study by IBM showed that consumers are much more focused on connecting with friends and family; more than 50 percent don’t even consider connecting with businesses. According to the same study, of the consumers who do connect with businesses online, more than 60 percent only do so because they’re already loyal to that business.

This is not progress.

So if customers aren’t seeking brand engagement, then what do they want? The answer is simple. They want the same thing that your company does: tangible value.

Given the virtual nature of social media, this can be a difficult deliverable to measure on both fronts. But for consumers, tangible value means making their life easier in some way:

• by providing helpful service
• by offering a discount
• by displaying a relevant offer that meets their needs
• by resolving a technical problem or dispute

Business Deliverables

On the business side, it’s important to find a way to track return on investment (ROI), though there isn’t a definite consensus yet for how to do this with Social CRM.

It may help to remember that your goal is not strictly financial. The best end-result is that you’re creating public advocates through successful social engagement, and that, of course, has infinite long-term value.

Here are some of the primary market benefits of employing Social CRM:

• Deeper customer engagement
• More advocates for your products and brand
• Wider dispersion of business message
• Constant barometer reading of public opinion
• Being equipped to take preemptive action

Take a lesson from the honey bee, which is aptly referred to as a “social insect.” A bee culturist estimated in the early 1900s that it takes about 48,000 miles of flight between hive and flowers to produce one quart of honey. In the rapidly expanding social media climate, your company must be willing to go that kind of distance between operations-as-usual and the social media venues that your customers pour their lives into. Then, and only then, will you produce the reward of successful customer relationships.

Top CRM Software Recommendations

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