Social media management platforms can be different, and we will show you how.
If you open the Sociality.io website, simple phrase welcomes you: "All in one social media management platform."
Sociality.io Team, wanted to create a platform, which would ultimately include every single function you need for publishing content, engaging with customers, listening to what is going on the internet and getting detailed reports about profiles' performance.
On Hootsuite website, the Value proposition states very similarly: "Manage all your social media in one place. From finding prospects to serving customers, Hootsuite helps you do more with your social media."
Both Hootsuite and Sociality.io enable you to expand your social media marketing strategies and enable you to implement strategies, which would be impossible to accomplish manually. From simple scheduling posts for a future time to comprehensive analytical options to track marketing performance, there is a big portion of additional, one can even call them "hidden" functions, that lie in between.
All cars allow you to move from point A to point B. Similar to cars, social media management platforms differentiate in the way they are engineered, marketed and cost. You need to find the platform, which will work for your company, organization or startup similarly as you buy a car. The only difference is in the elimination of the prestige factor.
Because both software has different plans, for the sake of this comparison we will compare the cheapest and the most expensive plans' functions.
Hootsuite Professional plan ($19/monthly) allows you to:
If you don't understand what all those functions mean in simple English, here is a detailed explanation:
You can schedule posts for the future. You don't need to post every post to all social media networks manually by opening each one. Create posts in advance and publish them at the right time, when your audience is more likely to see them.
Your company can have an account at each social media: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. Connecting 10 social media profiles is more than enough for companies small sizes. Some holdings, corporations with an umbrella of brand obviously need more.
Sometimes you won't know what to post. On Hootsuite there is an option, where it shows you content, that is similar to your audience's interests. So, you can retweet or share the existing content. It works both ways, your content can be discovered through Hootsuite by other social media profiles and shared.
Hootsuite Boost is a unique feature that allows you to manage social media marketing campaigns. It can automatically boost your already well-performing posts and advertise them according to a budget you choose. Or the same can be done manually. So, instead of managing Facebook campaigns on the Facebook page, you can do it in the Hootsuite itself. Different pricing plans limit you an amount that can be spent on social media ads.
Live support. It is always good to know that your complains will be heard by a company. Especially in situations when something goes wrong, you need to know that there is a great support team ready to help you.
In conclusion, Hootsuite Profesional plan is a nice upgrade or introduction to the world of social media management platforms' capabilities.
Sociality.io Personal plan will shock you how much more you can do with social media management tool and how broad the span of your social media marketing can be.
Scheduled posts, publishing directly to Instagram, reports and exports, keywords, alert emails, templates and so on!
Founders of Sociality.io believe that even small companies, small startups require more functions than what typically other management platforms allows them to perform.
Scheduling posts and monitoring engagement with your profiles is only one part of the required solution. But in order to understand unhidden functions, there has to be someone who would point to them. Otherwise, they will still be hidden from your view.
1. What is the point of doing any marketing activities without measuring the performance?
No matter how big or small business is you need comprehensive reports which will show you what you've done wrong or which type of content particularly did well.
Sociality.io reports improve your marketing performance by showing you fan increase/decrease, reach and engagement analysis of each of your content on each social media profile, including even Instagram Stories.
You can create an unlimited number of reports, as many or as little as you want without date limitations. Create reports on all accounts in any interval, export them as PPT files. Also, if you need reports to contain only specific charts, you can create a template and even add your brand logo.
2. What is the point of analyzing your marketing performance without understanding how well your competitors do?
Prepare your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube competitor analysis reports in just a few minutes. Those reports will help you to adjust your content strategy and understand what your common segment market likes to see and read.
3. Keyword Listen mode
Social media allows anybody and everyone to talk about your brand. Negative comments have an escalating effect and can deeply harm your brand's reputation. If your accounts are present on social media, part of your marketing strategies should also include listening strategies.
PR moved from press to social media platforms.
Sociality.io understand the growing need to monitor all internet and what people talk about your brand. Imagine doing it manually? Taking into consideration that customers are located all over the globe in all time zones and how much they text and share irrelevant for your company information.. Impossible, isn't it? Sociality.io enables you to automate the system; and the platform will send you email alerts if it detects negative sentiment from a big influencer. It also tracks in different languages. You can manage your global operations and social media in all languages with global tracking. Track everything about your brand by adding an unlimited number of keywords.
You may be wondering, what are downsides of Persona plan? No team collaboration (only one person can use it). Also, Sociality.io will store only 6 months of data and you can only add pages with less than 25K followers.
Any car can bring from point A to point B. The more expensive the car is, the better is the engine, support, quality of parts and prestige of the brand. You buy an expensive car because it improves your social status, and it works at it should work. Basically, expensive car won't break in the middle of the road when you are late for a business meeting.
Software pricing is different. The more expensive doesn't necessarily mean the better.
Social media management platforms vary in their pricing strategies. You have to pay attention not only to plan’s costs but also hidden cost. Some software asks you an extra dollar for a report, for example. We want you to be aware.
In Hootsuite, if you need to export analytics or customizable reports, be prepared to upgrade to a Team plan ($99/month). Also, if your social media marketing team is up to 3 people and you want to assign task within the platform, Professional plan won’t work for you.
If your organization spends more than $5000 each month on social media advertising, then you have to select a $599/month plan - Business. The plan allows you to connect up to 35 social media accounts.
The unique value that Hootsuite Business plan gives is platform training. Hootsuite Academy certificates are industry-recognized certifications. You don't need to train your social media marketers elsewhere, everything from onboarding training to acquiring new skills can be done in one platform. It's up to you to decide whether the added feature is worth $599 per month.
In the Business plan, Hootsuite enables for all social media posts to go through tight control. You need to be sure that your content correlates to brand values, is accurate and maybe even politically correct. Social media marketer creates contents, schedules it, and a manager than approves posts before they go live.
The feature is available even on Personal Sociality.io plan ($3/month).
Another unique Enterprise feature is shortening links. It is important on Twitter, for example, where you are limited to the number of usable characters. Sociality.io doesn't have the feature, instead, we can recommend your Bitly tool, which does the same feature for free.
It would be unfair for our readers to explain only one side of a coin. Yes, Sociality.io delivers greater value for a small portion of Hootsuite's plans. But it also has its own downsides.
At the beginning of the blog, we stated that we love our competitors because they motivate us to improve. We were able to come a long way and still adding more features and integrations to our platform.
Paying close attention to customers' feedback is our number one priority.
Lack of integrations is another downside of Sociality. The personal plan only includes integration with Zapier. Intercom integration is available at Team plan ($6/month). And very soon the Enterprise plan will also include Slack.
Hootsuite has 250+ integrations available. You’ll discover flexible and scalable ways to increase your reach and revenue. You can find al the possible integrations in here.Both paid and free these include Asana, Slack, Adobe Stock, Zapier and many more.
Sociality.io has come a long way but we are a company that is always improving, adding new features, fixing bugs and doing the best we can to deliver the best possible software for our clients.
We know that social media management platform should be evolving with social media networks and with global marketing trends. Functions that were "enough" a decade ago are outdated, and we want to make sure that whatever we do is evolving with global trends and even steps further.
