Yesterday Hootsuite announced their new premium plans…
As I looked at this I was shocked by the top end (the actual top end is not listed here, but is in their Enterprise Services at $1499-$1998 per month). The biggest shocker being their pricing emphasis on “Team Members” (a.k.a. other Hootsuite users who can use one or more of your social network accounts) rather than some sort of true functionality.
I recall just this past week looking through the FAQ’s and reading this & this (emphasis mine):
- “There is no cost to use the HootSuite Team Collaboration tools or any part of the social media dashboard at this time. Everything is free – though in the future, we will likely add premium level accounts.”
- “The web version of HootSuite as well as HootSuite Lite for iPhone and Android is currently free. HootSuite for iPhone and Android currently costs $2.99. We are investigating pricing plans and exciting new features for paid accounts.“
Fair enough. It’s worded in a way that says, “We do charge for some things & will be charging for other things at some point. Don’t get used to having everything you currently have for free”. You can’t argue with that. It’s pretty clear and from a business perspective understandable.
I have absolutely no problem paying for services. We’re in the business of getting paid for services & we pay for services all of the time if the ROI is there. Just earlier this week in some sort of prophetic thought I was thinking to myself that if Hootsuite charged $5/mo for the service I had at that point in time I’d be happy to pay it.
Beyond the whole Team Members issue (I need this to be expandable to an infinite number of users, even if it costs $4.99/mo for each additional user) their $4.99/mo a plan suites me just fine. But by charging $15 for the first team member for collaboration aspects (the “priority support” isn’t something I can see being used much & in my opinion should be there with any paid account), they’re really doing themselves no favors.
That said, I can see no good reason for most of our clients to bump up to the “Silver” plan solely for the purpose of allowing us access to their account via our account. And a good portion of them would probably be fine with the Basic plan as long as the advertising isn’t too annoying.
So having mulled this over we’ll be moving our internal Twitter collaboration over to CoTweet. Facebook pages updates will take place through our Bronze Hootsuite account or directly via Facebook by other team members. Post updates via RSS will continue to be handled via WordPress & the Facebook app. For clients, we’ll simply log into their accounts when needed. At the end of the day we may not be able to do everything the way we’d like to do it, but we can still do it.
Now it’s your turn. How will the Hootsuite changes affect you, if at all? What other applications & services do you use for your social media management? Let us know and if you’d like you can leave a voice message at 317-565-4250.