social media
Introduction
The following is a comparison of two full-featured social media management tools: Sprout Social and Hootsuite. Since these products support multiple social networks, and boost your Instagram presence, deciding between the two isn’t as simple as picking the one with the most features.
You must examine how each software performs its functions in order to determine the benefits of one over the other. Does the solution allow for the most efficient publishing? What about the more detailed reporting? Let’s compare Sprout Social and Hootsuite based on dashboards, publishing, scheduling, collaboration, reporting, and integration capabilities to help you answer those questions for yourself. Using our Product Selection Tool to get a free shortlist of social CRM vendor reviews and save time on testing.
Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: An Overview
Sprout Social was established in 2010 with the aim of allowing companies and consumers to connect more openly and gain real Instagram likes. The business has raised over $100 million in venture capital in the six years since its founding and has recently filed to go public. Sprout Social was created to provide companies with a variety of features while maintaining a pleasant user experience. Subaru, Ticketmaster, and Evernote are among the company’s notable clients.
BrightKit, the forerunner of Hootsuite, was created in 2008. Its aim was simple: to make it easier for companies to manage their social media accounts in one location, as well as to boost your Instagram presence and gain real Instagram likes. Hootsuite evolved from BrightKit, and the company now has 18 million customers, 1,400 employees, and offices in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Mexico City, London, Paris, Hamburg, and Sydney.
Feed Dashboards
Any true social media management tool will bring together posts from various social media platforms. The platform’s presentation of this data has a direct effect on usability. While both Hootsuite and Sprout Social aggregate posts in a feed, the way each product shows the feed differs significantly. Both of these boost your Instagram presence and gain real Instagram likes.
Publishing and scheduling
The publishing capabilities of these two platforms are nearly identical. From the main feed dashboard, you can compose a post, choose which account it comes from, attach photographs, shorten links, gain real Instagram likes, and select a target audience. Both products have a draught feature that allows you to save posts that aren’t quite ready for publication and come back to them later.
The bulk scheduling tool in Hootsuite allows you to schedule up to 50 posts by uploading a CSV file. Through its audience discovery function, Sprout Social adds some extra data to the publishing department, highlighting people or accounts you should follow as well as spam or bot accounts you should probably unfollow.
Sprout Social will boost your Instagram presence. Both platforms use a patented algorithm to determine the best times to post in order to get the most engagement from your audience.
Collaboration
Permission settings and publishing acceptance guidelines are the most common forms of collaboration in social media apps. Users may be assigned to one of three positions in Hootsuite: super admin, admin, or default. You can add one of the three permission settings to an entire team if you choose to handle employee Hootsuite accounts. This avoids uncomfortable circumstances such as mistakenly responding to customers twice.
Sprout Social has similar administrative features, including role-based permissions and multi-step publishing approval. Users of Sprout Social may also allocate any post in the feed as an assignment to an individual or team.
Reporting
Hootsuite is a more advanced tool in terms of reporting and customization. Your social media are divided into four views in the summary report: messages, fans, interaction, and metrics. Custom reports can be created in Hootsuite and then exported to PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, or CSV files.
Sprout Social also has a robust monitoring system. With a community report, you can see simple summary reports, compare your posts to competitors with competitor reports, and monitor team effectiveness with team and task success reports.
Integrations and extras
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn are all integrated into Hootsuite. They also have a directory of over 150 native integrations, with 127 of them being free. Users of Hootsuite may also use the Campaigns feature to create a landing page and run social contests and giveaways.
Sprout Social compensates for its lack of integrations with added features, such as its social CRM. Sprout Social maintains a record for each account that follows you or follows you, storing interaction history and basic contact information.
Conclusion
Both Sprout Social and Hootsuite offer three-tiered subscription models for their products. Higher levels are more costly, but they give you access to more features. Both platforms boost your Instagram presence and help you gain real Instagram likes. Sprout Social is much easier to look at and use from a concept standpoint.
Hootsuite prioritizes functionality over aesthetics. Hootsuite has a reporting advantage, but Sprout Social has more features, such as social CRM and audience discovery. It all comes down to what you’re searching for in the end. Both are excellent tools for managing your social media handles.
