I’m doing the Hootsuite training right now. Hootsuite Academy actually trains you in how to use and optimize your social media outlets the best. They take a lot of time to explain slowly how things work, what people look for and use, the demographics (such as if you market products for women, you should concentrate on Pinterest), etc.
I don’t know exactly how much I’ll get from them, since I only just started the training. All of it is free, unless you want to be listed on the Hootsuite Professionals page – then the last training session is about $200 or so (might be something nice to put on your LinkedIn profile).
I did find one big difference between Hootsuite and Buffer. I just want to schedule my tweets right now – I don’t want to have the engagements from all my social media in one place when I’m just trying to schedule my tweets and eventually LinkedIn and Facebook posts. So that’s a plus for Buffer.
Both Buffer and Hootsuite have Analytics pages, and I can see what was my most popular tweet! That’s what I like about Buffer, and Hootsuite according to the training has the same feature. So they come out even on that.
Hootsuite has an ability to (with one click) Rehoot something, where a Twitter Tweet is reposted X number of times over the next 2 months automatically, the number of times and days automatically they say is the best way to do it. If that works, then that may edge out Hootsuite over Buffer even better, as you’d have to manually ReBuffer a tweet yourself. I’m not sure I want to see a tweet by anyone over 21 times, but according to Hootsuite, a tweet has a lifespan of 30 minutes, and then is buried by all the other tweets on someone’s Twitter feed.
Conclusion
In the interests of fairness, I’ll say that all I’m using right now is Buffer. I haven’t added any services to Hootsuite, simply because when I set my tweets to post, I want to get in, get that done for the week, and then I’ll check Twitter later on. It’s up to you which service you’d prefer. And I’ll also add I’m using the free services of Buffer, and to really get the full impact you have to pay for either Hootsuite’s personal or for Buffer Awesome.
Have you tried Buffer or Hootsuite? Which do you prefer?
