HootSuite, one of the most popular Twitter-based sharing systems out there, has announced that they now have a ‘Pro’ version of their very popular service, starting at $5.99 per month.
With unlimited social networks, rss feeds, stats history, google analytics, facebook insights integration, and more, it might just be worth it for those already very much addicted to it (and for professional use).
I personally have not been able to incorporate it into my workflow so I won’t be making the jump, but that’s not a ding on the platform as a whole.
How about you? Worth it?
Dennis says
I am bummed! I really enjoy using Hootsuite personally and professionally. Running professional and personal accounts is great. I don’t even mind the ad support. But paying $6/month seems excessive.
Joseph Parente says
I think the initial plan was $14.99/mo, so I’m breathing a sigh of relief. `8)
Joseph Parente says
I am. HootSuite has been invaluable in managing a large number of networks for myself personally, as well as the social presence for several organizations. To me, the cost is reasonable for the overall benefit and the level of service. I am bummed that adding team members is going to be costly (at $15 per team member, per month) because I think that was a great tool for churches and ministries, but it may be too steep for a lot of non-profits.
Ryan says
If you can’t justify $15/month per Hootsuite team member, you should check out GroupTweet.com. It obviously doesn’t offer all the features of Hootsuite, but GroupTweet will enable an UNLIMITED number of team members to contribute content to a single Twitter timeline for only $5/month. You will likely need to sign up for the premium account because you won’t want all of your followers to be able to publish DM’s to your Twitter timeline. The Premium account will give you features such as Author Whitelisting or Message Moderation. You can tweak the settings so it displays messages coming from different team members or just as if there was only one person managing the account.
Lastly, you can use GroupTweet in conjunction with any Twitter client out there, ie Tweetdeck, Twitter.com or even Hootsuite’s free version…
Let me know if you have any questions, see http://www.grouptweet.com/about or email me at [email protected].
Joseph Parente says
Thanks Ryan, I’ll check it out.
Phill Tran says
Hope it wasn’t a typo the email notice I received regarding this had $5 for a team member.
Maybe a bonus for early adopters
Phill Tran says
Okay so the $5 a month per team member was for support only.
$5.99/ month sounds reasonable for a single manager, but for a a few team members the price climbs too quickly.
Joseph Parente says
Yeah, I found that confusing also until reading the detailed information. I have 10 team members across various networks and organizations right now, and because they’re pro-bono the cost is prohibitive. I do appreciate that they listened to users and backed-down from their initial plans over the summer.
Andy says
I just have a problem with companies that introduce a “free” product and get you hooked on how well it works and then turn around and take some of the functionality that you had been using for free and now want to charge you for it. Don’t do that! If you want to charge me for new functionality I’m fine with that but they are now limiting the RSS feeds to two feeds and I had four on my dashboard. Now I have to either remove two or pay. The original reason I went with Hootsuite was because of the features I got for free.
Becky says
I’m staying with the free version.
Dave from HootSuite says
Thanks for your feedback. Here at HootSuite HQ, we continue to listen to all feedback closely. While we realize charging and/or limiting accounts isn’t popular at first reaction, however, as a business, we analyzed user data and found a cut off point in which 95% of users would still fit into the free plans.
Keep in mind, we still offer a feature-loaded free plan which includes everything which was in HootSuite before we announced the premium plans in August. We also offer 4 free versions of mobile apps and will continue to release new tools and features for all plans.
If you have any other questions about the plans, please check the Help Articles: http://ow.ly/3dSNI
Thanks again for the candid feedback and for using HootSuite.
John Saddington says
thanks dave! love the support!