After receiving an Email from Hootsuite informing me that it was time to “Go Pro or Stay Free” I had actually already made my decision. The price they are charging to me seemed fair and after having evaluated the alternatives I will save a lot more than $5.99/month of headaches by using Hootsuite. The deliberations started for me months back on Amplify with a very in depth discussion about Hootsuite’s earlier announcement that they were going to start charging for the premium features with their service.

Pro or Basic?

Hootsuite, why do I need thee so?

Hootsuite is my social media dashboard. I manage my Twitter and Facebook accounts on there. I also access many customer pages and accounts as well, it is super nice to be able to have one place to go for all of these things regardless of where I am located, so why do I love Hootsuite?:

1. The platforms it supports (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Ping.fm etc)
2. The custom dashboards (must have, seriously!)
3. Ability to access customers accounts and collaborate.
4. Scheduling.
5. RSS/Atom feed support. (This is a absolute must for some of my clients accounts)

The surprising thing is looking at that list, I don’t really mention a ton of the other “features” that Hootsuite includes now as a premium product:

Decisions, decisions.

I am actually greatly looking forward to playing with the Analytics and Insights integration. I also really appreciate the fact that I have a product I can grow into adding team members as needed for an additional fee.

The bottom line, Owl’s are a sound investment

Ultimately I put my pragmatic business person hat on when evaluating the decision to pay for HootSuite. I just don’t see a free alternative that would not require a lot more effort or perhaps multiple products to do what I want to do.

The Owls are Happy...

Did you stick it out with Hootsuite or find a better solution?