Hootsuite vs Post Planner Review

Hey, good morning everybody. It's Shaun Whynacht here from Blue Cow Creative. It is a beautiful Monday, July 13th, and I wanted to create this video just to compare two online cloud-based utilities for helping you manage your social media. I had one of my clients send me an email the other evening asking me if I prefer Hootsuite for managing my social media, and I also replied back saying that I use a different software as well. So I want to go through and and compare both of them, show you them in action so you can kind of make a decision on your own. Now the benefit of using something like this is it allows you to manage multiple social media platforms with one login place. So why would you want to do that? For one, it's going to save you a lot of time, and two, it's going to be able to let you multipurpose content that you're creating, and then you don't have to keep posting it over and over again. So the two that I'm going to be comparing here, the first one is Hootsuite, which you see here on your screen. And the second one is one called Post Planner. Now I came across Post Planner a while back and I've just recently resubscribed to them because they've made some great updates. I'm going to show you both of them here in action. So in just a few seconds I'm going to jump back in here and we're going to be fully logged in. So here we are fully logged into Hootsuite. Now I've got my account set up with various tabs and different accounts that I manage, so there's a lot going on here that you look on the screen, but really It's quite simple once you start to understand how it works. So for example, we've got my Blue Cow Creative tab at the top. So any of these streams that I put in here relate to those accounts that I have. For example, this one here, Twitter, my home feed. So this would be everything that's coming through my home feed on Twitter for this Blue Cow Creative account. And I can refresh this and I can see certain things that are showing up here. So for example, if I wanted to look at something in here and let's say, you know, there's this news item here. I can do everything that I could do in regular Twitter within Hootsuite. I could reply, I could retweet, I could also send a direct message to the person. So I'm going to retweet this and I can go retweet to your followers, yes, or I can add a quote or I can edit what's being there. I'm just going to go yes and it's automatically retweeted as you see across the top. Now the other thing is the mentions. You want to be able to reply when somebody sends you a tweet and they mention you in it. So it's a good thing to be monitoring for those kind of things. So we have an entire stream here for whenever we are mentioned. So for example here, the 7 Minute Tourism Video Marketing, it was put out on June 24th here. If you wanna retweet that again, we can go and go yes, and there it's done. Now let's move over to the other ones here. These ones here represented by this flag is our company page. So this is any of the activity that's been happening on our Facebook page. So we can see it here. In this, this list of information. Also, we can see here anytime we get direct messages on Facebook. That's really quite awesome. Now, if you have a different company or you're managing other profiles, you can go ahead and create other tabs. So for example, let's say I wanted to go look at Wink Snacks, which is another company that we manage the social media for. We can go on here and we can see all their stuff, and you can switch back and forth between those two profiles. So here's where it really gets quite awesome. Because up at the top, this is where you can compose your message. So just like anywhere else, you would go in here and you could write a status. So let's just say it's, hope you're having a great Monday. Let's say that's very basic, that's what we want to do. Then we can pick on the left-hand side which of the profiles we have added that we want to post this to. So I'm going to post it to my personal Twitter account @ShaunWhynacht. If you want to follow me on there, that would be great. And we're also going to post— I'm going to post it to my Radiate Consulting one that's here, so 2 Twitter accounts at the same time. I could go ahead and I could put in an image just like I would anywhere else, or I can put in a link to another website. If you click on the scheduling tab, you can go up here, and right now I've got auto scheduling, so it would automatically pick when the best optimal impact, which is really great because it looks at when people are most engaged in your social media accounts and will post them at those times, but we can turn that off. And we can choose a different time. So if I don't want to post it out right now, let's just say I'm going to go 10 minutes later, that's great, and I'm going to go and say schedule. Now it's scheduled. So there's some really great benefits when it comes to Hootsuite, including the amount of accounts that you can actually post to. So let's just take a look at the different accounts. We're going to go add social network here, and it's going to pop up. So we can add accounts for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and WordPress. So if you've got a WordPress account where you've got a WordPress site, you can actually post posts to that, so your WordPress.com blog if you're a blogger. So that's really great. So keep that in mind, these are the accounts that you can be attached to. Now if you've got things scheduled, if we go over here and we look at the, the, this icon here called Publisher, this is really a great tool because as you start to publish things, it's going to put it in a calendar. As you see here, I don't have too much going on because I don't use this as much as I use Post Planner, which I'm going to show you in just a second. But let's say this tweet here that we wanted to put out, we didn't want it to go on this day. We wanted to put it out down here. Drag and drop. You can quickly rearrange your stuff in a calendar format based on what's happening in your business. This comes in really handy, for example, if you're promoting a sale that's coming up on the weekend. You can see in a calendar view when things are gonna roll out on social media. I'm just gonna put that back on the 13th and everything is good to go. So that right there in a nutshell is Hootsuite. Now let's hop on over and look at Post Planner. So Post Planner is a little bit different. Post Planner deals with Facebook and Twitter. So we're gonna go here, we're gonna sign in. I like the fact that it lets you sign in with your Facebook account. So I'm going to quickly sign in, it's going to authenticate me, and away I go. Now the other thing that's really great about Post Planner is the fact that they give you some content. So for example, if you look down the side here, we've got posts, we've got the schedule, so we could see a schedule of calendar items that were in here when things are going to happen, but then we get down to viral photos. So everybody loves viral photos, and the key with social media is you need people to get engaged, you need them to share your content. Whether you're selling things or selling products or services or promoting events, you need to have a healthy blend of interesting things that people want to share. These infographics, these viral photos are really helpful and they break it down by awesome quotes, engaging photos, funny photos and it's really awesome, okay. So we can look through anything about this. So as you scroll through, you got to make sure that a lot of them are appropriate. You know, let's just say we're looking for beautiful photos. So we're going to look through here, we're going to say, okay, so this lion photo, we're going to go and we're going to click add. It's going to pop up just like this and it's going to ask you, now you can pick your defaults, I have one for my company and I've got one for my Twitter account, so I'm going to get rid of the Blue Cow Facebook one and use my Twitter account and I'm going to write in here, what's going to make you Roar this week. Okay, and we can post this in here, and we can go ahead and we can post it now, or we can queue it, put it in a queue, or we can share next so we have a sequence of stuff, or we can schedule the post just like we did in Hootsuite. We can pop it up here, pick the date, pick the time, and go ahead and click schedule. In this case, I don't want to do that. I'm going to post it right now. Just like that, sweet, the post has been added. Puts it in the queue. The other thing that it can do is top content. So this is based on different things, different categories, technology and business, but you can go ahead and do different searches. So for example, if you're in gardening, into gardening, we can look for gardening tips. It's gonna do a quick search online. It's going to give you articles that are already written online that you can share. This is always going to be up to date, and you can pick by week, month, today, or all. You can break down the different ways that it displays this content. Let's say we wanted to share something. We can go in here. We can go add. It's going to pop up the story, show us a share bar if you want. On there, you can upload a new photo. You can add multiple accounts. You can go in here and all the different accounts that you have added, you can create, or you can create a list. So you can have, let's say, you know, one different company and you can create a list and it will actually put all those different social media networks in there. Okay, this one's going to Twitter. If I wanted to put it on Facebook as well, let's just say here's my personal Facebook. We're going to do that and we're going to get rid of the Twitter. So we're going to go in here. I'm going to actually get rid of the URL because it's already going to have this attached, and we're going to go ahead and we're going to post now. And that's posted. The other last thing that's really great in here is quick status ideas. Now, we always want quick little ideas that are out there, just like I said, you know, what makes you roar today, those kind of things. So they're always giving you great topics here to think about, and there's a huge list of things that always get updated. So if you're stuck on things to say and you want to get something out there to get people engaged, this is a great way to do it. Also, they got different categories: ask, likes, fill in the blanks. So, you know, fill in the blanks, you can't keep a blank, insert your brand. So if your brand was a pet, what kind of pet would it be? These are great thought-provoking social media statuses that you can use. And all you do is, let's say this is what you want, you click the plus, it's going to copy it to your clipboard, and then you can go up here, paste it in, replace the topic that's in brackets, and away you go. Insights. This is going to give you the snapshot of your different posts and what's happening out there. So just like you can in Facebook, you can go in here and see the insights for the different profiles that you're managing. So if you want to bring up ones for your personal profile, there's none there because I haven't been using it for that, but mostly my company one is in here. So this is a great way to do this. The share bar, the last part in here, is this is a bar that comes in. So if you post an article, it's going to actually put it within an iframe. Now if you're not familiar with an iframe, it's just kind of a cutout in a browser, and it's going to have a share bar across the top which tells people to share it, and it kind of gives your brand even more leverage. So I'm gonna go in here, I'm gonna custom brand mine here. I didn't do this because I wanted to show this in the video. My share bar, you could also turn this on and you could add in here if you want the agency plan for $99 a month, you can get more social media profiles, more team members, and you can custom brand it, but we're not gonna do that. So Facebook URL, so Facebook, .com/bluecowcreative. And for Twitter, I'm gonna use my own personal one. I strongly suggest, and I can do another video on this, that you should use personal names when you are doing Facebook, and not Facebook, but using Twitter updates. That really comes in handy. And you can go ahead in here and fill in all this extra stuff. We're not gonna go ahead and do this just for the sake of the length of this video. It's gonna come in handy. So the long and short of both of these reviews is I like Post Planner a lot better than Hootsuite for accounts that I'm managing just Facebook and Twitter, and I need to come up with creative content. Now, if you need to schedule on LinkedIn, Hootsuite's going to be your only option to do that. So, if you're a professional that really relies on LinkedIn as one of your social media networks, Hootsuite is really the option you're going to have to go with. Hopefully these two reviews, seeing them in action, will help you decide. There is a fee for both of them, and really it's minimal compared to the, the time saving and what it gives you in return. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, you should check out other videos that we've created on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/bluecowcreative. Until the next video, have a great day and happy