Hootsuite: How to use the Hootsuite free plan to make your social media effortless
I’ve been using Hootsuite’s free social media scheduler to plan my content marketing for a number of years now and have found it a useful part of my social media strategy. Today I’m sharing a simple walk-through of how to set up your first social post using Hootsuite to help you get started over there.
What is Hootsuite? Hootsuite is a social media scheduler which allows you to create content and post it out across varying platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest and Wordpress at given times. These dates and times can be picked by you, based on your understanding of audience activity, or at a predetermined time Hootsuite has calculated given it’s knowledge and developer API keys with each social platform.
How to use the Hootsuite free plan
I have created a walk through video of how to set up your first post on Hootsuite.
The Hootsuite Dashboard
The dashboard on Hootsuite allows you to do several things;
Plan your content - scheduling your content ahead of time allows you to avoid having to log in every single day to each social media platform in order to post something you have to say. This is useful for your audience, because they love story flow, but it is particularly useful for you, because you can concentrate on the customer service commenting and platform engagement during the week. This is a crucial part of your marketing plan.
Social Monitoring - beyond regular engagement on your channel, or via the DMs social listening is a really useful tool. It helps you understand how competitor social marketing is evolving and explore your customer’s avatar more deeply.
Analytics - on the free version of Hootsuite you will find the monitoring aspect is pretty limited, but insights do include comprehensive and real-time reports on how your social channels and campaigns are performing on the paid tiers (paid and organic).
Integrations - Hootsuite have around 150 integration partners, which means you can create a better workflow between your social media scheduler and your content creation, or customer service. Integrations include; ZenDesk, Canva, Salesforce, and Google my Business.
Watch the video above for a look at what the dashboard looks like.
My thoughts on the Hootsuite free plan
Having used several social media schedulers over the past eight or nine years I have realised my preferred way to implement my weekly social media strategy. In that time I’ve tried a number of software platforms to make it work for me and whilst I haven’t found the perfect one-size-fits-all package I think Hootsuite has been pretty far up there in the rankings of good software to use. So here are my pros and cons of the Hootsuite free plan;
Pros
Video uploads - Hootsuite allows video uploads on their free plan, where most do not.
Social listening – social listening is the act of following relevant hashtags to see what’s trending or being said. You can also use this to track what’s being said about your own brand.
Interactions – Hootsuite allows you to comment and answer interactions on posts you have sent, or from those accounts you follow. It also allows you to answer your channel messages too.
Mobile App – this has ben fairly useful especially for posting to Instagram. It’s basic, but has been useful!
Statistics – Hootsuite gives a basic statistic report in the free plan which is great if you want to follow what’s happening on your channels closely.
Help library – they do have a good help library that allows you to learn how to use their software better.
Useful newsletter – I’ve found their newsletters useful in the past also. They are full of interesting information about social media and trends. You can also find this information under their resource pages.
Cons
30 pieces of content – for the longest time Hootsuite allowed 90 pieces of content in your free plan account to be pre-scheduled at any one time. Now it’s just 30. This is a big problem if you want to schedule ahead more than 10 days across 3 channels… or less if you multi tweet per day on Twitter!
The system can be clunky to get started with and I don’t find it the most intuitive.
Not able to view my content in a weekly layout – this may not be a problem for most, but as a visual planner I do like to see what my content looks like over a period of time, so that I can make sure my message is on track.
Very occasionally the system will fail to post. This does happen with most software and will usually be a result of implemented upgrades. It can be a bit tricky to find those failed posts to reschedule them though!
On the free plan my experience has been that there is really no software support. Emails often go unanswered if I’m honest, so if you want the software to work for you, you have to be very hands-on when it comes down to tracking down answers to problems you come across. This is where I feel their library shines.
Whilst I do recommend the Hootsuite free version for small businesses who are on a budget I do have to be open and honest and say that I use Hootsuite these days just for posting my video content once a week and some social listening. This is because I have another software package that I use daily. This has mainly come about as my personal preferences and business needs have changed over time.
How much is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite starts from around £25 per month, which allows one user ten social accounts, automated post scheduling, key performance metrics and an Ad spend limit of £400 per month to boost posts. Here is their compare plans page.
Takeaways
Hootsuite is a great tool if you are starting out with pre-planning your social media content. I do recommend trying out their free plan and seeing what you think.
Looking for alternatives to Hootsuite?
I have also been using Buffer and Recurpost as an alternative to Hootsuite and you can find those blog posts at