How Hootsuite Works

With Hootsuite, you can create content, schedule it, and analyze its performance from a single dashboard. 

Besides content creation and management, Hootsuite helps you track your brand reputation, follow competitors’ activity, and keep up with the latest trends. 

Now, let’s analyze Hootsuite’s best features. 

OwlyWriter AI

Hootsuite streamlines content creation with its OwlyWriter AI. 

Similar to other LinkedIn tools, you have to provide it with a prompt and Hootsuite will write the post for you. 

If you plan on using Hootsuite to create content for your LinkedIn account, it might not be the best choice. 

The content looks more like a caption for Instagram or Facebook—either too short or too long, with hashtags and everything crammed into one single paragraph, making it less reader-friendly.

Next to the generator, there’s a post previewer so you can check how your content looks before it goes live.

However, it misses one essential feature for LinkedIn engagement. Hootsuite's preview generator doesn’t include LinkedIn’s “See more” cut-off. 

So you can’t tell where your LinkedIn hook cuts off, making it harder to write an attention-grabbing intro. 

AI Content Assistant

Not happy with your generated post? Hootsuite’s features include an AI assistant to help you improve your content. 

You can repurpose your posts, start from scratch, get inspired, or turn web content into social media posts. 

The AI assistant offers several features, including grammar and spelling correction, length optimization, tone adjustment, and the addition of engagement elements like CTAs.

Hootsuite’s multi-platform focus makes it hard for its AI writer to optimize the content for each social network. For example, the generated posts are too long for LinkedIn and the CTAs seem too generic.

Publish and Schedule

Another standout feature of Hootsuite is its ability to schedule posts across multiple social media platforms from a single interface.

You can view your editorial calendar by month or week and track your posting volume.

Additionally, the platform allows you to filter by social media network or post status.

For community managers or businesses deeply invested in their social media presence, having all your content visible in one calendar is an invaluable feature.

Social Listening

You can manage your brand’s reputation with Hootsuite’s social listening. 

Social listening involves monitoring online conversations to gauge public sentiment, track trends, and gather insights about your brand.

The tool provides key metrics such as the number of mentions, engagement levels, sentiment analysis, and the sources of these mentions.

You can filter results by sentiment, media type, region, and language, but unfortunately, there isn't a LinkedIn-specific filter, which limits its effectiveness in that area.

Additionally, having a guide or training would be beneficial to fully use these features and better understand the data, as interpreting the results can be challenging without some context.

Analytics

Hootsuite provides an extensive analytics section to assist with understanding the impact of your posts. It allows you to track reactions and engagement to adjust your content strategy. 

The Analytics dashboard gives you an overview of key metrics and insights, offering a clear picture of how your content is performing.

Hootsuite’s analytics features include:

• Organic Reporting: This tool provides insights into post performance and the best times to publish.
  However, it's available only for LinkedIn Pages and not personal accounts.

• Post Engagement Tool: This feature tracks key metrics to analyze audience interaction with your content.
  However, it only works if you schedule your LinkedIn posts directly on the Hootsuite platform.

• Benchmarking: This feature lets you track and analyze your competitors' activities.

  To use it effectively, you need to connect accounts from Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and link your Instagram Business account.

The need to connect multiple accounts and navigate through various setup steps makes this process more time-consuming than expected.