Storymate Review Does It Really Work
Hootsuite vs. Storymate: We Rated 10 Key Factors for Each
With 75 percent of high tech earning online adults using Facebook, according to Pew Research, it is no wonder that social media is a high priority for marketers. Not only is it a top priority for marketers working in a business, it is also a burgeoning route of revenue generation for freelance marketers. In fact, according to ClearVoice's freelancer cover rate study, 80% of specialist freelancers are producing sociable media articles for their clientele.
The social networking landscape is changing quickly also. In a few years, we have seen the rise and minor fall of Snapchat, we have seen Instagram fast go into third place for many popular social networking networks, and we have seen the proliferation of chatbots, making Facebook Messenger a social media tool that marketers need to comprehend.
Ben Beck contrasts two popular social media posting tools, Hootsuite along with Storymate, in his yearly update of his rated reviews. Which one is ideal for your business? Which enhanced more?
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That's why I've refreshed this guide, which was initially printed in March of 2017. For this week's #MartechMonday post I've taken the following close look in Hootsuite vs. Storymate.
Summary of Hootsuite and Storymate
I've used both Hootsuite and Storymate extensively, and have neither affiliate nor additional direct ties to both of these firms. Both are excellent solutions; but, in my view they appeal to various audiences. Below is a summarization of the review, together with the fuller inspection, in addition to the grading for every criterion. I've also included the grading rubric in March 2017 when I first wrote this guide, pre-refresh, so that you can see how things have changed in the past year.
Hootsuite
Initial impressions
Logging in and getting Hootsuite setup was simple enough, though it was not a remarkable experience. Rather, it felt as though I had been employing a Microsoft-made product circa Windows 10. Even with a year passing as I initially wrote this bit, they still haven't updated their interface, and it seems clunky.
It obviously has a great deal of performance, but is not all that nicely styled or simple to use. You'll see from the under Hootsuite-provided screenshot that there is a good deal of functionality in this item, such as the capability to incorporate at a Freshdesk feed, even although the product looks a little complicated compared to Storymate.
Main strength
Hootsuite is strong and has included substantial functionality in the previous year: improved group management functions such as content approvals, improved content suggestions, and a library to put away pre-approved content.
Even though Hootsuite has sunset their 10/month plan, and now starts at $30/month, it continues to be less expensive than many other similar options. Therefore, I believe the cost and balance of operation the principal strength of this option.
Main weakness
Hootsuite's strong features come at a price tag. Instead of feeling as if you're working with a svelte Apple merchandise, you're stuck working using an antiquated-feeling user interface -- similar to an old, stale Microsoft merchandise. Don't consider this as a Microsoft bashing, though; I'm scanning this post from a Microsoft Surface Novel, my favourite computer of all time. Like Microsoft products, though, Hootsuite provides you all of the whistles and bells, but with a clunkier interface.
Pricing
$29.99/month (yearly billing) -- Complimentary solution remains offered for those with very basic requirements or just wanting to kick the tires
Grade
Initial impressions
When you first log into Storymate, you're presented with a clean user interface. Super clean, minimalist interface. Light and easy directions. The very first couple of minutes I researched the product, however, I detected it lacked a number of the performance I enjoyed in Hootsuite. The below screenshot, provided by Storymate, illustrates how clear and clean their product is.
Main strength
Storymate rules at the ease-of-use standard. It's a slick product, using a clear and clean interface. It also shines with Pablo, a easy-to-use graphic creation tool. In addition to the ease-of-use, Storymate also boasts an energetic development group which, in the last calendar year, has launched a completely new product named Reply, also is poised to release yet another, known as Analyze.
Main weakness
What you obtain with ease-of-use, you often give in feature set. This is accurate for Storymate. Your scheduling, content recommendations, and analytics and reporting functions are weak in Storymate, in comparison to Hootsuite.
Pricing
What Will Be the Largest Content Challenges?
We asked 1,000 marketers about their articles challenges. After sorting answers into seven classes, comprised of 35 topics in complete, here are our findings.
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Hootsuite vs. Storymate grades and standing
In pile ranking and judging these two excellent social media posting solutions, I employed the following eight criteria: that social networking networks each instrument can post into; the pricing; just how easy and powerful of single-view dashboards are there; the ease-of-use; exactly what extras are offered; just how great they are in ad-hoc posting; how successful the scheduled posting is; how and what sort of content recommendation tools exist in the products.
Here's how the two stack up, with a general grading matrix under:
1. Widest coverage on Social Networking accounts
This is only one of the most crucial aspects of social media marketing, and one facet business marketing professionals are assessing the most -- by which they can obtain their messages submitted to. Thus, of the eight classes assessed, I weighted this one in 10 percent.
Storymate: You can place to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, App.net and Google+.
A few of those add-ons are regarded as premium programs, and you have to pay extra on them. Hootsuite obviously has the advantage.
2. Ease-of-use
You will spend a good deal of time in your social networking management alternative, and it ought to be a joyous experience. I weighted this standard at 15 percent.
Storymate: All things considered, Storymate is somewhat more easy and considerably cleaner-looking in its own layout; and thus, Storymate wins this class. From the below screenshot, from Storymate, you can observe how visually appealing and easy-to-use Storymate is.
Hootsuite: Just Like Storymate, Hootsuite is easy to use and does not have an extremely sharp learning curve to become a power-user.
3. Scheduled posting
Scheduled posting is among the key reasons marketers turn to social networking management solutions. Unless you go to a larger organization with dedicated social media entrepreneurs, then you'll need scheduled communicating, since it allows you to appear as if you are extremely busy on social networking when in reality you're logging in only a couple of times every week and scheduling your posts out. Of course, social websites does need some fluency, therefore I recommend a mix of scheduled and ad-hoc posting. Having said that, this is a very important criterion. I weighted it heavily of all eight criteria: 15 percentage.
Storymate: Though Storymate does possess some scheduling capacity, it is not as strong or integrated into the tool because Hootsuite's.
Hootsuite: The edge here goes to Hootsuite, which has very powerful programming performance. That is the authentic defining criterion of Hootsuite versus all other social networking management solutions.
4. Ad hoc posting
As stated previously, ad-hoc posting is essential to making a consideration more responsive for breaking news. Ad-hoc posting allows a social networking advertising professional to post things on the fly, even adding more immediacy to their social networking presence. I categorize this as being a more important judging grade, therefore I weighted this at 10 percent.
Storymate: The edge here goes to Storymate. The two Hootsuite and Storymate have widgets that allow you to post content directly from the browser, as you're consuming content. You don't need to select a day/time you want the social post to go live. Rather, you just click to post it and Storymate will place it in line at which it believes is best.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite enables you to post in the Chrome plugin and has a feature where you can disable the manual scheduling (similar to Storymate). However, Storymate does it much better that a lot of those"societal share" plugins such as blogs which have a native"share via Storymate" button incorporated into them. As an example, in the social share case below, you can see that Sumo Share natively integrates Storymate into their share options -- something I have never noticed for Hootsuite.
5. Conversation Administration
An area that both tools have marginally eased over the years, conversion management is getting a hot"must-have" attribute in the last few years. Conversation management permits you to select the back and forth dialogue that occurs in comments or direct messages on social networking and better keep them organized within your social media management option. Anyone that has tried to support a product or service via social networking knows that every social platform has different methods of holding conversation, along with the true forth and back can be difficult to monitor and manage in a timely manner. Storymate takes the win for conversation direction, as I explain below. I have seen this standard at 10 percent.
Storymate: Storymate has entered the customer-service space with Storymate Reply, an instrument devoted to helping companies better handle the back and forth communication that occurs on social networking. It is a really robust tool, and departs, in ways, by the ease of Storymate's publishing tool.
That said, if you are supporting a service or product via social stations, then you probably understand the demand for a more robust instrument, something which allows you to make internal notes to a conversation, delegate dialogs to staff members, then push certain content to third-party tools (CRMs, Slack, etc.) and allow for help special reporting.
Storymate does all these things with Reply. The pricing of Response starts at $50/month, again a departure from the way things was with Storymate (a low-cost plan at $15/month). Superior customer service is something that is intentional, though, and Storymate has assembled a sufficiently robust product and priced it so.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite provides some conversation management performance in its platform that allows you to do exactly what Storymate does, although it isn't as elegant or as thoughtfully assembled out. Here's a page in which Hootsuite outlines some of the performance. I have talked to customer service individuals that have tried to use Hootsuite, and they continue to have frustrations with how in which the platform is assembled, with regard to providing support on societal stations.
6. Reporting and dashboard views
For business users, accountability for time and money spent on marketing is crucial, and great reporting and searchable dashboard perspectives come into play. As important as coverage is, I've worked in several organizations where social networking accountability wasn't as large as it should be. I believe it is a shame, however, it's a reality also. Thus, I've weighted this standard only at 5%.
Storymate: With Storymate, you want to click on each network to view them separately. There's no powerful dashboard presence. Also, reporting with Storymate is not as feature-rich as Hootsuite.
Hootsuite: Hootsuite wins this one, just because it is possible to see multiple social networking networks all in the same view. Hootsuite also supplies more effective reporting performance, as can be observed from the below analytics screenshot by their site.
7. Content recommendations
Content suggestions can be important to a budding social media supervisor, who is still learning an industry. If you're uncertain what it's possible to post, articles recommendations will show you a few prospective posts that may be related to your audience. While these are significant and might be widely leveraged by the majority of business users, many still don't know how to use them. Therefore, I'm weighing this criterion in 10 percent.
Storymate: Although Storymate did have articles recommendations at once, they've pulled support for this performance. Their justification is a great one: offering content recommendations was not true to their purpose and mission.
Hootsuite does an OK job with content suggestions, but not wonderful.
8. Content library
A content catalogue for saving new post thoughts and propagating them to your inner team is more important than ever before, as companies become more complicated with their use of social networking and as your company should continue to evolve to remain relevant. Both programs offer mechanisms to detect new articles, but just one of those tools includes a strong content library alternative which allows you to save time using pre-approved content your internal teams can post out of. Because this operation is an excellent wishlist thing but is similar to the content recommendation that Hootsuite has needed for some time, I have seen this criterion at only 5 percent.
Storymate: Storymate features a content library and articles integrations (unlike Hootsuite), which makes it a less appealing tool to moderate to larger businesses which will need to scale their social media efforts.
Hootsuite: Within the past year, Hootsuite has turned up their game in this field. Their articles library performance lets you curate content and store it into an area of the tool which can be readily searched. Also, you can tag articles to make it even more findable, and then you may view use stats to see how the library material has been leveraged.
Although this operation is reserved for the ones that pay for their small business or enterprise package, cloud content integrations (available to all package tiers) also further distinguish Hootsuite from Storymate. Using cloud content, you also are able to access content stored in most of the primary online cloud file services (Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.), to pull new article suggestions for your marketing team. Because of these two elements, Hootsuite wins the struggle for curating content.
9. Product extras
I'm not discussing core attributes here. To the contrary, I am speaking entirely different tools. While I normally advocate for a business to focus on their core strength and not spread themselves too thinly across several product lines, in the instance of Storymate, they have done an exceptional job of supplying up a fresh product which offers a excellent add-on performance to their base merchandise. I provide this estimating criterion 10% weight.
Storymate: Due to Pablo, Storymate wins this standard. I am not speaking painters , though I'm guessing the title of this product does hail from the famed painter Pablo Picasso. With this tool, Storymate supplies a new product which allows you to produce visually stunning images in seconds.
Pablo is not a full-on infographic creation tool, but it does allow you to earn easy and quick graphics for social media sharing. In addition, Storymate is creating a brand new Analyze tool, that it claims will revolutionize how social media supervisors capture meaningful data on the performance of their postings. It's still in alphabut you can signup for early beta accessibility when it's ready.
Hootsuite: Although Hootsuite does an superb job of adhering to its core product and not branching out, within this situation, but that's a drawback.
10. Pricing
Pricing can also be a standard we assessed. Though, social media management solutions are so competitively priced, in comparison to other marketing and advertising solutions, it does not appear to be as big of a concern for promotion professionals. As such, I've seen this at just 10 percent.
The two Hootsuite and Storymate are all about the same. They utilize the freemium version, and also their free versions actually are very good by themselves. Their characteristic full versions intro at about $10/month. In addition they have business accounts where you can have several users, and they also are priced quite similarly. No obvious advantage holder at pricing.
So do I advocate Storymate or even Hootsuite?
Again, both of these social media management alternatives are excellent. For the company user, however, they do pile up a little differently. Here are the 2018 levels for Hootsuite vs. Storymate:
For your reference, here are the grades we conducted in 2017, comparing Hootsuite and Storymate. You can observe that in the last year Storymate gets closed some with newer functionality is has developed, but Hootsuite still has a small edge.
2017 Criteria and Grading of Hootsuite vs Storymate
I use both these tools religiously. I've both paid Hootsuite along with Storymate accounts, and I use these interchangeably. I utilize Hootsuite longer for reporting, articles suggestions and scheduling posts. I utilize Storymate for everyday ad-hoc articles. Like I see content I like, I will simply click the Storymate button within my Chrome browser window and also easily share the material I had been studying.
That saidI wouldn't suggest this to most professional marketers, largely because handling many tools could be problematic, and business users should build best practices around one product. In my situation, where I'm a single ranger for the business's social networking attempts, it is OK to get a bit more complicated.
Hootsuite vs. Storymate: Top Takeaways
For medium to business users, I urge Hootsuite. It is a really powerful way that covers more ground than Storymate.
For small business users, I urge Storymate. It is a slick tool that allows you to do everything you normally need to do, and it is such a joy to work with.
For customer support teams, I urge Storymate. Together with the new Reply alternative, Storymate requires the lead in allowing customer support teams to offer support via social networking channels.