Evan Carmichael breaks down Hootsuite's freemium model: the free tier covers up to three social profiles with basic scheduling, while Pro costs $8.99/month and adds bulk uploading via Excel. He uses it for one Twitter and two Facebook accounts and recommends starting free before upgrading.
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Hey, it's Tech Tuesday, and today I'm answering a question from one of my YouTube viewers— love you guys— Shelly Babe, who asked, is Hootsuite a free service? So Shelly Babe, I'm a huge Hootsuite fan. Here is my Hootsuite. I use it mostly just for Twitter with a little bit of my personal and my business Facebook accounts. And I use it to track my sent tweets, various lists. I look at this every single day, every single day. I've set it up so that it's been super helpful in helping me manage my accounts. But is it free? So the answer is kind of. Hootsuite works on a freemium model, so you get a lot for free, and then if you want upgrades, then you have to pay for them. So here's the page that talks about the plans. It's hootsuite.com/plans. Now I don't work for Hootsuite or make any money off of it, I'm just a happy customer. And for years I was on the free plan. This is the free plan. You can get up to 3 social profiles for free. So you saw that I use my, my Twitter account, my personal Facebook, and my business Facebook. Those are 3. Although really, if it said only up to 1, I'd still be on the free plan and just use it for Twitter. And you get a little bit of basic features, but most of the benefits that I like using Hootsuite for, you can get in the free package. The only reason why I went Pro, so I'm on this plan now, it's $9 a month or $8.99 a month, is right— where is it— message scheduling here. Basic versus Advanced. So this is the difference. If you ever need to schedule your messages, you can go to Hootsuite and you can click Schedule. You can add a specific tweet at a certain time and put it whenever you want, right? So August 28th at this time, and it will single post, and you can do that. In the free plan you can do that, and it's super helpful. But if you ever need to send bulk messages in advance, then this bulk message uploader is only available if you pay for it. And what you can do here is upload a file, it's an Excel file that has the tweets you want to get out at whatever time, and Hootsuite will send it out at those times. This I needed to use because I do tweet chats, and every month I do a tweet chat and we're talking about small business issues and people ask me questions and I have a list of all the people who are in my previous tweet chats and they said, "Hey, let us know when the next one's coming out." So usually the day before I'll send a message to everybody saying, "Hey, tomorrow is the tweet chat day." And to schedule them in one by one by one by one is too time-consuming. And so to be able to do it all from an Excel file and upload it to Hootsuite for me is worth $9 a month. But that's the only reason I'm on the pro version. So I would say take a spin with it, get started, do the free version. There's so many powerful features that you can use there. And if you have questions about it, let me know and I can help you out, maybe make another video for you. And then if you discover that you need more than 3 profiles or you really need to do, you know, you need more analytics or you wanna add your team to it so they can manage it for you, or you know, you need to do better scheduling like what I just talked about, then you can look at doing the $8.99 a month plan, and it's a 30-day free trial so you can check it out. But really, get started on the free. Most people are on the free, and it can get you really far. You know, I get tons of comments on Twitter, and I'm almost a power user, but Twitter is a big part of my business, and so I was able to stay on the free plan for a super long time. So if you're just getting started, that's definitely a way to set up. So it is kind of free with some cool paid option upgrades. Believe. For those of you watching, you like the video, you can subscribe to the channel. You can support me by clicking on a link in the description and leave a comment. Let me know what you think. I love your comments. They make me want to keep doing more videos for you. So thank you and I will see you soon.
