We handle a lot of social media management for clients. This means we use quite a lot of social media tools. At Destination Digital we use Hootsuite and Buffer, as well as native scheduling tools, to help us manage social media posts for our clients.
If you’re looking at investing in either Buffer or Hootsuite, then hopefully this blog will help you decide which one is right for your business needs.
How much do Hootsuite and Buffer cost?
The first thing to look at is cost, as depending on your budget this can have an influencing factor on which tool to choose.
Hootsuite
All Hootsuite plans support Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube. They offer one basic free plan and several paid plan options, as well as custom solutions for Enterprise organisations which have their own unique pricing structure.
Here’s a basic overview of what each Hootsuite price plan has to offer:
Hootsuite Free
- 1 user
- 2 social accounts
- Schedule up to 5 posts at once
Hootsuite Professional
- From £39 a month
- 1 user
- 10 social accounts
- Schedule unlimited posts
- Access messages in one inbox
Hootsuite Team
- From £99 a month
- 3 users
- 20 social accounts
- Schedule unlimited posts
- Access messages in one inbox
Hootsuite Business
- From £520 a month
- 5+ users
- 35 social accounts
- Schedule unlimited posts
- Access messages in one inbox
Buffer
All Buffer plans support Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. All the paid plans also support Pinterest, but unfortunately the basic free option does not. Here’s an overview of what each Buffer plan has to offer:
Buffer Free
- 1 user
- 3 social accounts
- Schedule 10 posts per social account
Buffer Pro
- From $15 a month
- 1 user
- 8 social accounts
- 100 scheduled posts per social account
Buffer Premium
- From $65 a month
- 2 users
- 8 social accounts
- 2000 scheduled posts per social account
Buffer Business
- From $99 a month
- 6 users
- 25 social accounts
- 2000 scheduled posts per social account
Good Features in Hootsuite and Buffer
Both tools pretty much do the same thing at the most basic of functions, as do other social media scheduling tools that are out there i.e., they allow you to schedule social media posts in advance according to times you choose on a calendar.
So really in this part of the article, we are picking out some of our favourite features, and some of the things that bug us to share our insights and help you to make a decision on which tool to go for.
- Both Hootsuite and Buffer can add carousel images to Instagram, which is a handy thing to be able to do. You can add up to 10 images so that people can swipe and view more on one post. This has the effect of looking like a live managed Instagram feed for the end users on an account, and sometimes, frankly, you need more than one image to convey what you would like to say so this is a really handy feature. The drawback, however, is that the post will need a manual push via mobile notification to get it out onto Instagram, which is roughly the same as loading it on the app and posting it natively at an appointed hour anyway, so… a point to each for supporting carousel posts, but a point docked for not being able to schedule directly
- Buffer can only schedule one image at a time on Instagram without further push intervention, but what you can do that you can’t on Hootsuite is tag a location and a product from within the scheduling software which is a really cool feature. You can also post a threaded first comment post whilst you are queuing up an Instagram post. This last feature is really good for being able to add your hashtag cloud as a first comment to keep your main post looking tidier. This means… 3 points to Buffer
- Buffer also has a really cool feature to create hashtag groups. So if you regularly use hashtags for certain types of posts, it saves having to type them all out each time. If, like us, you work across lots of different clients with lots of different subject matters, this is a great time saving tool. 1 point to Buffer
- One of the drawbacks of Buffer we have found is that tagging on Facebook and LinkedIn is not very reliable. Sometimes when a tag has been accepted within the software it then goes on to publish to that platform without the tag intact or writes it out long hand with the @handle to the post itself which looks clumsy. This is a bit of a pain because you have to go back and edit the post on the live platform after you’ve published it, which is a waste of time. You use a scheduling software tool in the first place to save you time! Minus 1 point for Buffer
- Hootsuite is much better at tagging on different platforms, and we’ve found that once you tagged in Hootsuite, they come out on the live platforms intact. A side note on LinkedIn at this point, however, to say that no third-party scheduling software will allow you to tag personal profiles on LinkedIn. If you wish to do this, you have to login to the live platform and edit the post you have published already to tag in your connections, or do it live. 1 point to Hootsuite
- Maybe this is our perception, but Hootsuite appears to kick us out more often than Buffer for re-authentication. Whilst it’s sensible to re-authenticate sometimes, when it happens and if you’re not present for a few hours it halts your posting activity and you can find that you’ve missed posts that then need to be picked up and rescheduled. Not sure we can really dock a point from Hootsuite for this…
- Hootsuite is good for being able to multi-select channels to publish to at the same time. So if you have a short post and a picture that is good to use on Twitter and Facebook, you simply choose both channels in the drop-down and then schedule them simultaneously. On Buffer you have to schedule each channel individually, and if you are writing in excess of 1,500 posts a month like we are, then you can soon see how this adds quite a lot of time to this activity. 1 point to Hootsuite
- Additionally, in Hootsuite you can multi-select channels for posting the same general message, but then you can individually edit to tweak the message to suit the platform it’s going out on. All-in-all this multi-channel management feature is better developed on Hootsuite to enable quicker editing. 1 point to Hootsuite
- We almost always use the publisher section of Hootsuite to schedule large numbers of posts at a time. It’s a bit of a pain that this is quite buried in the Hootsuite interface and takes us four clicks to get to the part of the tool that we use the most. But once you are there in this view you get to see all the posts on a page in a tidy list. You can also toggle to ‘day view’, ‘week view’ or ‘month-at-a-glance’ view to see how many gaps you have in your posting routine. Again this is quite an elegant feature. 1 point to Hootsuite for the tidy list, and minus 1 point for burying it so deeply.
- Over on Buffer, the slots you are allocated by default are the ones that are when Buffer thinks you should be posting. So this means that you will get two or three slots offered at different times of the day. These time slots change according to the channel that you choose to post to. This is quite handy if you can see that the choice of time is suggested for you, and the frequency of posting is also suggested to you. 1 point to Buffer for making it easier to see when and how often you should be posting
- However, the Buffer list view is quite chunky, meaning that there is an awful lot of scrolling that must go on if you have quite a few posts already scheduled in and you are looking for gaps. Already mentioned above is the fact that you can’t multi-select channels to publish at the same time, and so although there is a large list in Hootsuite, if you have a great number of pre-scheduled posts to look through you have to do it three of four times if you are scheduling on 3 or 4 channels on Buffer. That’s a lot more scrolling! 1 point to Hootsuite
- Buffer does give you a good preview of the post as you scroll through your list, whereas on Hootsuite you can get a preview by rolling over an item in the list, but you have to click into it to really take a good look at it. This makes it easier as an editor in Buffer to pick up any editorial glitches or mistakes that need correcting before the post goes out. 1 point to Buffer
- A tiny feature of Hootsuite that is potentially valuable when scheduling posts for Facebook is the ability to add the photos that you schedule to specific albums on your Facebook page. Most of us just post photos straight to the timeline photos album, but if for instance you are at a show and are collecting all images into one album, or you have a specific campaign you might have album set up specifically for the purpose of gathering all artwork in one place then being able to add extra images to a Facebook album is a really handy feature. It’s a small feature on the Facebook scheduling part of Hootsuite helps you keep your images in tidy order. 1 point to Hootsuite
Can I schedule posts on social media for free?
It is also possible to schedule posts without using paid for platforms and we’ve written a blog about that right here. Although we use Hootsuite and Buffer at Destination Digital, we also use native scheduling for some specific applications. There are features on the live platforms that are only available on those native platforms, and so when we need to use these, we head on over to the pages themselves and schedule from there.
Where do I sign up?
Head to the Hootsuite website or the Buffer website to find out more information on their many different scheduling plans and to sign up for an account of your own.
Read more
We hope that you found this article useful. Take a look at the other social media help articles we’ve put together:
We’re sure there will be additions to this list, so maybe bookmark this page if you found it helpful.
Contact us
If you’d like help with social media management or want an appraisal of your social media strategy, please email us on info@destination-digital.co.uk or give us a call on 01629 810199.
