HootSuite Upgrades

Andrew Ariotti

March 22, 2011

We at Jibe Media love Social Networking! We’re constantly searching for new ways to utilize existing tools to make our lives, and the lives of our clients, easier in the social media arena. One social media tool that we highly recommend to clients is HootSuite. HootSuite (in a nutshell) is an online Social Media Dashboard. It can connect to all of your SM accounts and display them all in one attractive dashboard. It competes with another tool called TweetDeck, which has similar features.

Just recently HootSuite released a new analytics component that taps in to your Facebook Insights and Google Analytics account to bring all of the analytics into one place. This allows you to see how effective your SM work has been in the grand perspective of your web presence. The concept looks really good in the video below:

However, one thing that they don’t mention in their video (quite frustrating, really) is anything regarding what they refer to as “Analytics Points.” Analytics Points are basically what you spend in order to generate a report. Without points, no reports. Pro accounts get 50 points per month to use. More points are $1 each. The worst part? Each report costs you 50 points! In other words, if you want to run a report you are spending $50. WOW!

As you can see in the video above, this feature is very cool. It’s mashing together all of your analytics and giving you a cool report builder to make it all happen. You can add logos, graphs, tables, and pretty much anything you can see in your Google Analytics reports. It’s a great concept, but WAY too pricy. $50 per report will never be worth it. What would work? I think that charging $50/mo should be enough to run unlimited reports. From a technical side, I’m sure they are trying to cover all of the development cost and heavy server usage that’s going on behind the scenes. In my opinion, this is not the way to do it.

Kind of a negative post of an upgrade that I was actually excited about. The features really are cool, but the cost is going to scare a lot of people away—especially businesses. Will bigger corporations bite? Not likely, in my opinion. Will the pricing structure change? My guess is that it most likely will, let’s just give it some time.