Hootsuite / Sprout Social
The platforms that let Digital Marketing Managers schedule, publish, monitor, and report on social media content across multiple channels from a single dashboard — replacing the daily manual login to five separate apps.
What it is
About Hootsuite / Sprout Social
Hootsuite and Sprout Social are the two leading social media management platforms, each serving slightly different use cases. Hootsuite is the more established tool, built for teams managing high post volumes across many social accounts simultaneously. A single Hootsuite dashboard connects to Facebook Pages, Instagram Business accounts, LinkedIn Company Pages, X (Twitter), Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok, displaying all streams in a configurable column layout. The content calendar allows posts to be drafted, scheduled, and queued weeks in advance across all channels; Hootsuite's AutoSchedule feature analyses historical engagement data to recommend optimal posting times for each network. The platform's social listening streams allow teams to monitor brand mentions, competitor hashtags, and industry keywords in real time without opening each platform individually. Hootsuite Analytics consolidates performance metrics — reach, impressions, engagement rate, follower growth, link clicks — from all connected accounts into a single report, exportable as a branded PDF for client or stakeholder reporting. Sprout Social operates at a higher price point and targets medium-to-large teams with more sophisticated workflow and reporting needs. Its Smart Inbox consolidates every incoming message, comment, and mention from all connected social accounts into a single chronological feed — allowing community managers to respond, assign to team members, tag by topic, and mark as complete without switching platforms. Sprout's reporting suite is more granular than Hootsuite's: it can break down performance by post type, posting time, tag, and team member response time, and its competitor benchmarking reports track the share of voice and posting frequency of up to five competitor accounts. For agencies managing multiple client accounts with distinct reporting requirements, Sprout's client-level permissions and white-label reporting are significant advantages over Hootsuite. Both platforms have introduced AI content assist features — suggesting caption copy, hashtag sets, and optimal posting windows — which are useful for reducing drafting time but require editorial review before publishing.
What you can do with it
Capabilities
Build a month's worth of social content in a single session using Hootsuite's content calendar — drafting 40–50 posts across LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, scheduling each to the optimal time recommended by AutoSchedule, adding UTM-tagged links for conversion tracking, and tagging posts by campaign so performance can be filtered in reporting
Set up Hootsuite Streams to monitor a brand's social presence in real time — creating columns for direct mentions of the brand handle, mentions of a competitor's brand name, posts containing a specific campaign hashtag, and keyword mentions of the product category, then reviewing the streams each morning to identify engagement opportunities and emerging issues
Use Sprout Social's Smart Inbox to manage community responses at scale — filtering the combined inbox by unanswered comments on paid posts, assigning product-related queries to the e-commerce team member and brand partnership enquiries to the marketing manager, tagging each conversation by topic (complaint, partnership, press) and marking items complete so team response time is tracked in reporting
Build a monthly social performance report in Sprout Social — selecting the date range, choosing the Post Performance report, filtering by network and profile, reviewing which post formats (video versus image versus link) achieved the highest average engagement rate by network, and exporting the branded PDF to send to the marketing director
Run a Sprout Social competitor benchmarking report — entering up to five competitor brand handles, selecting a 90-day window, reviewing their posting frequency by day of week, average engagement rate per post, and share of voice versus the client brand, then using the findings to identify content formats and posting cadences the competitor is over- or under-investing in
How to learn it
Learning Resources
Hootsuite Academy (education.hootsuite.com) — free; official Hootsuite training courses covering platform setup, content scheduling, analytics, and social advertising; leads to Hootsuite Social Marketing Certification
Sprout Social Learning Portal (learn.sproutsocial.com) — free; official Sprout training with platform walkthroughs, reporting tutorials, and social strategy courses; Sprout Certification available
Hootsuite free plan trial — the free plan (2 accounts, 5 scheduled posts) is enough to learn the scheduling and streams interface before committing to a paid plan; pair with a personal Instagram and LinkedIn account to practise the full workflow
Hootsuite Blog and Sprout Social Insights — both companies publish practitioner-focused editorial content (sproutsocial.com/insights, blog.hootsuite.com) covering platform algorithm changes, content strategy, benchmarking data by industry, and social analytics methodology; among the better free resources in the social media marketing space
Pro Tip
The highest-leverage use of Hootsuite or Sprout is the monthly reporting export to stakeholders — but the report is only as useful as the UTM tagging on every link you've scheduled. Set up a consistent UTM convention (utm_source=linkedin, utm_medium=social, utm_campaign=campaign-name) before you schedule a single post, and enforce it across the team. Without it, Google Analytics 4 will attribute all social traffic to Direct, and the monthly report will show engagement metrics in Hootsuite but revenue contribution in GA4 will be invisible.
Skills that use this tool
Roles that use this tool
Alternatives