If you have been on one of my Twitter workshops or had training from me, you may be using HootSuite to manage your Tweets. HootSuite has recently offered a paid version and is currently asking all current users to decide whether they want to go with the paid version. What are the main differences? Here is an outline:
Free Option
- You can have up to 5 profiles on your HootSuite account. This may be made up of 1 Twitter account, 1 Facebook, 1 Facebook business page and 1 LinkedIn. If you manage more than 1 Twitter account – you may need to upgrade.
- Stats – up to 30 days history. Probably enough since you can download to a csv file
- RSS Feeds – set up your blog(s) to automatically get displayed in your Social networking feed. You can set up to 2 – perhaps 1 to your Twitter feed and 1 to Facebook
Paid Option ($5.99/month)
- Unlimited number of profiles,
- Unlimited number of RSS feeds
- Unlimited days of Stats
- You can see which other Social Networking sites your followers belong to.
- Include Google Analytics in HootSuite – see your website visits from within Hootsuite and overlay your tweets to see the impact your tweets is having on your website visits.
- Ad Free
- Add a team member. You can have more than one person manage your feeds. Each team member will see what each other is doing.
For most people, the free option will be sufficient but you may that it is worth the money each month to be ad free and see Google Analytics from HootSuite.
HootSuite vs Tweetdeck
There will undoubtedly be people who decide to try out Tweetdeck as an alternative to paying for HootSuite. I used to be a big supporter of Tweetdeck, but am personally prepared to pay a small amount for the additional features that HootSuite gives me including teams, tabs, Google Analytics integration, the available anywhere nature of the internet based application.
Are you going to use the free version of HootSuite or are you prepared to pay?