Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media marketing and management tool. Its user-friendly interface makes it possible for businesses to coordinate and synchronise their social media marketing strategy by creating, scheduling, monitoring, and analysing content from a single convenient dashboard.
While there are other platforms out there with similar capabilities, Hootsuite offers a complete solution for the social media management needs of small tourism businesses. This article provides a brief overview of Hootsuite’s features and what you can do with the tool. So, if you are a small tourism business and haven’t used Hootsuite before, this might be just what you’re looking for. 
Let’s Get Social
Social media marketing offers huge potential benefits for tourism businesses in areas such as customer engagement and brand promotion. The immediacy of mobile devices and rising customer expectations means that responsiveness to content feedback and campaigns is a prime factor in staying competitive in a crowded marketplace.
It’s true that the native tools included with standalone popular social media channels already possess a broad range of features. But just imagine the convenience and valuable hours saved by integrating multiple social media accounts so they can be accessed from one place. If that notion appeals to you, or you’re still on the fence, then read on.
Cost Considerations
Tourism enterprises will be keenly aware of their marketing budgets in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, Hootsuite has got you covered by offering a reasonable entry point. For instance, 39 euros per month based on annual billing, currently buys you their Professional plan. You can see the features in the graphic below (or check out their other options in your own currency).
Hootsuite: Professional Social Media Marketing for Tourism
Small and micro-sized tourism and hospitality ventures wishing to boost their inbound social media marketing will no doubt recognise the value of Hootsuite Professional. And this is the version of Hootsuite’s social media marketing platform we would recommend, at least as a starting point.
For the toe dippers out there who’d rather test the waters before taking the plunge, Hootsuite does offer a Free version. However, we should point out that ‘free’ in this case restricts a single user to 2 social accounts and 5 scheduled messages. Handy features for the private individual perhaps, but missing out on most of the powerful core features of the Professional plan.
At almost 3 times the price, the Team plan offered by Hootsuite adds 2 extra users, 20 social accounts and some extra team functionality. This may not be necessary for small scale tourism businesses, who can cope just fine with a single user. Besides, if you really need those additions, you can always upgrade later.
Supported Channels
At the time of writing, Hootsuite (Web, iOS, Android, Chrome) supports the following social media channels:
- YouTube
Surely enough to meet the needs of a small tourism business.
Using Hootsuite’s Social Media Management Tool
There’s no rocket science involved. In fact, Hootsuite setup has been made so easy that you can be up and running in an Internet minute. If you can use social media, you can absolutely use Hootsuite. This also makes it a snap for onboarding, so you don’t even need to be a marketer to use it. How cool is that?
How to Use Hootsuite in 13 Minutes
Big Features for Small Businesses
Any business looking to build a strong social media strategy will benefit from using Hootsuite. Small tourism companies, for example, can really streamline their inbound marketing by taking advantage of certain key features.
Shared Inbox
A single inbox allows you to monitor and keep up with queries, which increases response time. You’re less likely to miss customer interactions with this feature. Plus, it makes for a more efficient workflow, eliminating the jumping around from one account to another.
Analyse This
This feature is a one-stop monitoring station for all your social networks. Performance can be tracked over time and reports can be customised.
The list of metrics is exhaustive, but a comprehensive list of Hootsuite’s available analytics data can be found here.
Further Hootsuite Adventures
As a platform that has been evolving since 2008, Hootsuite has far too many other nifty features to be listed here. With this in mind, we’ve included the following videos for those wanting to take a deeper dive into this social media management tool.
Authors’ Impressions
We’ll be honest upfront and say that neither of us have had any hands-on experience of Hootsuite. Consequently, our impressions are limited to what we have read and seen online. However, when we consider our combined usage of social media, we can see the benefits.
Having used multiple social media channels in a business context, it’s easy to appreciate what Hootsuite has to offer. The ability to manage all accounts from one location is a very tempting proposition. Small tourism companies should seriously consider this as part of their marketing strategy, if they have not done so already. The world is increasingly digital and times are uncertain. Personalised, customer centric products are clearly the future of tourism. A tool such as Hootsuite makes that all the more doable.
Finally, we should mention the matter of online opinions from actual users of Hootsuite within the last year or so. When Googling, there appears to be a general consensus that Hootsuite is somewhat lagging behind the competition in terms of functionality and value for money. It’s not the majority, but is still something to consider. So, the bottom line is, although you can’t go wrong with Hootsuite as a small tourism business, it wouldn’t hurt to shop around. Digital marketing does not stand still for long, if at all.
Links
Hootsuite Academy
Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
Best Social Media Management Tools 2022
The 5 best social media management tools in 2022
How the TikTok Algorithm Works in 2022 (and How to Work With It)
Thank you for this overview of Hootsuite!
So far I have only worked with Google Ads and Analytics to manage anything related to digital marketing. Analytics did have a code snippet which could be placed on websites to track traffic but nothing nearly as complete as this. I would be really curious to sign up even just for the test version and see what it is like to manage several social media accounts from one dashboard. How handy is it really?
I do appreciate your honesty in pointing out some of the negative reviews you have read online. Usually something I do to decide if something is worth the buy is look at 5-star and 1-star reviews. Even when there are not many 1-star reviews, if they are all about similar issues it shows there may be a problem with the product and as you noted in this case shopping around and comparing USPs may be worthwhile.
As I said I have not yet used the Hootsuite dashboard myself but I did notice that they also have a library of free resources related to social media. I found especially the Digital Trends annual reports very helpful. Do you know if there is an even larger library of materials available once a business signs up for the paid service?
Thank you for your comments and interest in the article.
Yes, these tools are so feature-rich that there’s nothing like hands-on experience to gauge their usefulness. If I had multiple SoMe accounts, I would probably give the free version a whirl after finding out about Hootsuite, if only from an efficiency perspective.
I think the majority of online complaints about Hootsuite centre around its increasing prices. Having only recently looked at the tool, I can’t really speak to this issue as I have no historical reference point. I suppose potential customers will have to do their own cost-benefit analysis, maybe after giving the free version a tryout, which I guess is what I would do in the same position.
I must admit, I haven’t come across any resource library other than the one available on their site. There is also the Hootsuite apps directory, which, while not an information resource, apparently contains over 150 free and paid apps to expand its capabilities. I was particularly interested to see the WooCommerce integration and might investigate further.
Thanks again !
This is a really great article and summary of Hootsuite. I really enjoyed reading it and it was really informative and exciting to learn so much about this amazing tool.
Honestly, I have never heard of it before but assumed that something like this would exist, a programme to schedule posts on social media and sync the strategy on different platforms. I think this is a kind of genius.
The price for this programme is really reasonable in my opinion and is a great investment for smaller and bigger companies. I also think that it has many amazing features especially the reporting templates, the auto-scheduling and getting the messages all in one inbox. I appreciate the detailed explanation of the features which gave me an even better understanding of what it does.
You have nicely visualized the article with pictures and more tutorial videos for beginners.
I agree with Liisa that your honesty about some negative reviews. It shows that you have really familiarized yourself with Hootsuite and dived a bit deeper into the research of this programme. Thank you for sharing this blog and great job!
Thank you for introducing this tool! I believe it (and other similar tools) is unfamiliar for most non-business users, so you provided very valuable information.
An excellent job, also at how you created the blog post.
Thank you for the informative post!
As someone who has never heard of Hootsuite before, the blog got me interested and based on the knowledge given I would be willing to give it a try. It seems like the kind of platform that really saves time and effort which as an entrepreneur would be really limited.
I’ve never been in charge of social media for companies so I don’t have personal experience with how difficult managing many account at once can be. However the blog is very interesting and it has a lot of valuable information. Good job!
I had never heard of Hootsuite before reading this article and you have done a good job of introducing this tool in a clear and concise way. I did not think that there would be a tool such as this to manage social media platforms. This is very handy information to know that this exists and possibly can save lots of time, although I have no idea how difficult it is to run business social media accounts. Overall a very nice read and it was very fun to learn about new tools that could help me in the future.
Hey!
Thank you for this blog post! I personally have never even heard of Hootsuite, so this was especially interesting to get to know about it. You provided a very clear structure, loads of video materials (thank you for that, especially I appreciate this a lot because very often I miss information while reading something :D)
I also found it very visually attractive so I definitely wouldn’t get bored from reading through plain paragraphs only.
I would add my personal experience here, but as I have never heard of this tool I logically also have never used it before haha. However, I really liked how you introduced it to the audience!
All the best
Magdalena/Malla