Working-age internet users are spending more time on social media than ever before. It therefore makes sense that businesses are committing more time and budget towards social media marketing.
The problem for most businesses, whether they are operating in the B2C or B2B space, is that social media isn’t a direct driver of revenue. So, although we’re proponents of being active on social media, it can be tricky to know how much time and budget to devote to social media marketing.
This is the value of social media management tools: they promise more efficient workflows as well as features designed to improve the effectiveness of your social media marketing.
In this guide, we put two of the biggest social media management tools head-to-head in Buffer vs. Hootsuite.
Let’s get into it.
Jump to heading:
- The benefits of using social media management tools
- Managing social media marketing with Hootsuite
- Managing social media marketing with Buffer
- Our final say: Hootsuite vs Buffer
- Take your social media marketing to the next level
The benefits of using social media management tools
If you’ve ever tried to build a social media presence, you’ll be aware that it takes planning, analysis and consistent effort. This is where social media management tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer can bring real benefits.
The primary value of social media management tools revolves around the integration of multiple social apps into a centralised dashboard, which makes workflows much more time efficient. A secondary, but equally important benefit for many businesses, is the ability to improve all aspects of business intelligence.
Time efficient workflows
Social media management tools are sometimes referred to as ‘social schedulers’ as they allow you to schedule content days, weeks and months in advance of a set publishing time and date.
The ability to schedule your social posts in advance helps to ensure consistency in your social media marketing. Furthermore, the ability to schedule gives you and your team more time to create high-quality content whilst executing coordinated social media campaigns.
Perhaps the most powerful feature of social media management tools, in terms of time efficiency, is that they allow for cross-platform management. Looking past the Buffer vs Hootsuite comparison, the majority of social media management tools can integrate multiple social media accounts into one centralised dashboard. A single dashboard allows you to simultaneously schedule and publish, rather than navigating between and manually uploading to multiple platforms.
The centralised dashboard is a universal feature, and is the reason why you should consider the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of each tool before making a decision over which one to use.
Improved business intelligence
Business intelligence refers to using analytics and data visualisation tools to help make data-driven decisions. Social media management tools condense your analytics and reporting into a single platform, allowing you to create custom dashboards based on key metrics of your choosing.
Instead of manually reporting on individual social media campaigns, social media management tools allow you to view and compare data from multiple campaigns and social apps in one place. This top-level view of the performance of your social campaigns is much more likely to lead to valuable insights on what type of content or tactics are working for each platform.
Paid social advertising gets a mention here also, as many social management tools allow for the integration of data from paid social media advertising. Not only can you set up and manage social media advertising campaigns but also draw on data from previous and existing campaigns.
Managing social media marketing with Hootsuite
Launched in 2008, Hootsuite is the most well known social media management software on the market today. The platform has an extensive feature set that allows for comprehensive management of the major social channels.
Hootsuite stands out for its impressive suite of analytics tools and powerful business intelligence capabilities. These include industry and competitor benchmarking reports that give useful insights into your social media performance.
Feature-rich, Hootsuite is undoubtedly a powerful social media management tool, however, the additional functionality comes at a price. Hootsuite has a steeper learning curve for users looking to get the most out of it. Furthermore, the starting price of £89 per month may be hard to justify for smaller businesses and agencies that aren’t overly focused on social media. Social media marketing usually involves other costs, so you need to consider your overall budget for social.
Content creation & scheduling
Hootsuite was the original bulk scheduling tool and gives you the ability to upload images and schedule up to 350 posts across multiple social channels simultaneously. You can also edit or tailor posts to suit the audiences on each different social app.
Hootsuite currently integrates with the most popular social media platforms, including; Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and X (formerly known as Twitter). Hootsuite also has useful content creation features, including integrations with the Pixabay image library and the ability to design assets using Canva within the Hootsuite Composer.
Hootsuite’s AI assistant, OwlyWriterAI, can also assist with content creation. OwlyWriter can be used in various ways, such as repurposing blogs and other web content into social media posts or generating hashtags. This AI assistant certainly isn’t a panacea and most outputs require some degree of editing, but it can be useful for generating ideas.
Engagement & conversation management
The ability to engage with prospects and respond to customers directly is one of social media’s most powerful attributes. When it comes to engagement and conversation management tools, Hootsuite allows users to respond to public mentions and private conversations across multiple social media channels from a centralised dashboard.
In comparison to other social media management tools, Hootsuite’s engagement and inbox management feature has much wider functionality that can be used to improve team collaboration and customise workflows.
With Hootsuite’s inbox management you can
- Add tags that allow you to filter conversation/messages by topic;
- Assign certain conversations to team members;
- Create a library of default or saved replies that can be used to quickly respond to FAQs;
- Plus there’s the ability to add notes and create contact attributes, such as name that allow for increased personalisation.
Analytics & business intelligence
Another area where Hootsuite has an advantage over the competition is in analytics and business intelligence tools.
Analytics and data visualisation is an area where the user interface design has a significant impact on user experience. Hootsuite has refined their analytics and now allows users to create custom dashboards and feeds using ‘Streams’. The Streams feature gives you extensive control over the channels, data and metrics you want to analyse.
The level of personalisation and granularity that’s possible on Hootsuite analytics is impressive. In particular, Hootsuite has excellent data visualisation capabilities.
There’s also useful business intelligence tools built around the ability to set ‘goals’ for each social channel. This feature draws on historical performance and existing data to give suggestions that support your selected goals. The suggestions could relate to the best times to publish posts or the type of content to publish on certain social channels.
Hootsuite is best suited to…social media agencies and larger businesses
Having gone through multiple iterations since its initial launch in 2008, Hootsuite is now a feature-rich social media management tool with powerful functionality. Although Hootsuite is user-friendly for the most part, the extensive functionality means there is a much steeper learning curve and a long setup process.
Hootsuite does offer a 30-day free trial that allows users to get a feel for the tool, but the ‘Professional’ plan has a starting price of £89 a month. Costing over £1000 annually, the Professional plan is the cheapest option and only gives access to one user meaning many of the useful collaboration and delegation features aren’t even applicable.
Based on the feature set, level of technicality and cost, Hootsuite is best suited to larger businesses and social media agencies looking to extract value from multiple social media channels.
Managing social media marketing with Buffer
Buffer is the other major player in social media management tools. Buffer has established itself as the most popular alternative to Hootsuite by aiming to simplify the processes associated with social media management. Where Hootsuite has focussed on an extended feature set, Buffer has focussed on providing excellent fundamental features and accessibility.
This approach has led to Buffer building a reputation as the social media management tool for positive user experience. This reputation is deserved. In our experience, Buffer’s standout attribute is the intuitiveness of its user interface. You still have excellent scheduling and analytics capabilities but without the additional bells and whistles offered by Hootsuite.
As well as the intuitive user interface, Buffer also offers a free plan that allows users to connect three social channels; schedule up to 30 posts at a time; and includes 24/7 customer support and Buffer’s AI-assisted content creation tool. Whatever way you look at it, Buffer is accessible.
Content creation & scheduling
Buffer’s publishing dashboard allows you to plan and schedule content across multiple social media channels simultaneously. The list of social media apps that Buffer integrates with includes; Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Google Business, Mastodon, Start Page, and YouTube.
Buffer uses a queue system, whereby you set a publishing schedule and then add posts to the queue. Posts in the queue are then published automatically in line with your pre-set schedule.
As well as being compatible with multiple social channels, this scheduling system supports a variety of post types. Uploading images into the publishing dashboard is simple, and if you’re in need of visual assets, Buffer has integrations with Google Photos and Unsplash.
Buffer’s AI Assistant is broadly similar to Hootsuite’s. It can be used to generate new content ideas, repurpose old posts, and rewrite or translate copy. Aside from brainstorming, perhaps the most useful thing about the AI assistant is its ability to repurpose posts into a suitable format for each social media channel —for example, you can repurpose a long-form LinkedIn post into a series of posts or a thread to be used on X.
Engagement & conversation management
Buffer’s engagement feature is much simpler than the conversation management tool offered by Hootsuite. The simple dashboard only integrates with Facebook and Instagram, but despite the limited coverage, it is useful for staying on top of mentions and messages.
Note that the engagement and conversation management tool is not available on Buffer’s free plan. You’ll have to sign up to the Essentials plan, at least, to attain the engagement tools.
Analytics & business intelligence
As with the other features of Buffer, the analytics suite offers the essential fundamentals within a clean dashboard. Buffer’s analytics tool integrates with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Shopify. A standout feature of Buffer’s analytics tool is the level of integration with Instagram —Buffer is one of a few social media management tools that collates analytics data on Instagram Stories.
As well as viewing the key metrics for each social media channel in custom dashboards, you can create customised reports based on the metrics that you judge to be most important for each social channel. Buffer makes it easy to export your analytics data into tables and charts that can be downloaded and shared as PDFs.
Buffer adds value to your analytics with some useful business intelligence features. Once you’ve built up some historical data, Buffer is able to make suggestions around the optimal times to publish posts and the most suitable type of posts to publish on each social channel (Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn).
Buffer is best suited to… solopreneurs and small to medium sized businesses
Buffer’s free plan gives access to most of the basic features that you’d expect from a social media management tool. The free plan runs indefinitely and allows users to connect 3 social media channels and schedule up to 30 posts at a time.
As well as being more accessible in terms of pricing, Buffer is also user-friendly with intuitive dashboards. The flexible pricing and focus on user experience means that Buffer is the perfect social media management tool for solopreneurs and small to medium sized businesses.
Comparing Hootsuite vs Buffer
Both of these social media management tools have similar feature sets, but where they differ is in the level of granularity. Buffer covers the fundamentals well, but Hootsuite’s features allow users to go further. Take analytics as an example; with Hootsuite, the analytics and business intelligence tools can be tailored to your goals for each social media platform. This can lead to specific insights and improvements to the overall effectiveness of your social media marketing.
Luckily, both Hootsuite and Buffer offer free trials of paid plans, allowing you to test out key features, such as content creation and scheduling, before you make a financial commitment.
| Hootsuite | Buffer | |
| £89/month | Minimum Price | Free plan |
| 30 days | Free Trial of Paid Plan | 14 days |
| Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube | Social Channels | TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Mastodon, YouTube, Google Business, Shopify, Pinterest |
| Advanced | Analytics | Essentials |
| Yes | Content Creation & Scheduling | Yes |
| Yes | Paid Social Monitoring | No |
| Yes | Engagement / Conversation Management Tool | Yes |
| Complex | User Interface | Simple |
| Technical | User Experience | Accessible |
| Yes | AI Assistant | Yes |
| 24/7 | Customer Support | 24/7 |
Take your social media marketing to the next level
Whatever your goals on social media, at WebHummel we can help take your efforts to the next level. In fact, we’re so confident in our social media marketing services that we guarantee to increase your likes, follows and overall user engagement.
A large part of our success in achieving results on social media comes from our familiarity with our favourite social media management tool: Gain. Yes, in the world of social media management, it isn’t all about Buffer vs Hootsuite!
For us, Gain is the perfect social media management tool as it allows for smooth collaboration between client and agency. No more endless email chains, just well thought out social media marketing.
If you’re ready to ‘create a buzz’ on social media and turn social into an effective channel for your business, reach out and we can schedule a chat.
