As someone who works in the Social Media space as a small non-profit, I’m always looking for tools to make things easier while optimizing results. One of the things I’ve personally found critical to a campaign’s success are tools that allow you to schedule posts instead of having to manually post them to social media channels. As of recently there have been more platforms that allow this functionality (Later, Canva, and even Facebook now allows you to schedule posts), but as I was beginning to accrue more work a few years ago there were very few tools that allowed you to do this. Using programs to schedule posts is an integral part of successful campaigns in that you can use articles found on Sprout Social and others to schedule and share your posts during periods of heavy traffic to increase your post’s visibility.
Hootsuite for a long time was perfect for me. Not only can you schedule posts on a myriad of platforms, but you can monitor metrics and reply to post comments directly through the program. You can also create detailed data analysis reports using a myriad of tools and metrics to create in-depth graphs and charts of your post’s performance through engagement metrics, video views, impressions, comments, and brand mentions. Hootsuite also tracks mentions of your posts on other social media accounts, which allows you to remain active on shares and reposts of your content. It really is a one-stop shop for everything you need to create, manage, and optimize your social media presence.
The only downside here is the price. At the time of writing, the base cost of Hootsuite is now $49 a month, which is a steep increase from the free version offered a few years ago.
Pros
- Schedule Posts
- Respond to posts in app
- Tracks mentions
- Get detailed analysis on likes, engagement
- Creates Reports
Cons
- Price
- Limited