What is Later?
Later is an all-in-one social marketing platform for Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, and Tiktok. It allows you to plan, analyze and publish your content in order to help your business grow and save time on social marketing. Later is considered one of the best tools for the top social networks and is right at your fingertips.
Some of the main features of Later include:
- Scheduling
- Analytics
- Hashtag Performance
- Content planning and curation
- Reporting
Later is a social media management platform that is more than just scheduling. It has tools that are built for sharing photos, videos, and stories. For Instagram, you can build a phenomenal feed with the help of its tools. The plans are flexible and there is no pressure on pricing and it has simple software which is easy to use for newbies and pros alike.
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is a social media marketing solution that can easily manage all your social media including Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest, and you can connect it to WhatsApp and manage live chat for WhatsApp and many other messengers as well.
It helps to create and schedule posts, manage all of your channels, plan upcoming campaigns, stay on top of incoming messages, analyze your results, boost your social reach, stay on top of trends and set strategies with confidence, and optimize your advertising budget by managing the social and search ads. It is meant for everyone including freelancers, social media experts, small teams, and medium to large teams.
Here are some of the features of Hootsuite:
- Content curation and publishing
- Social inbox
- Social listening
- Social media advertising
- Analytics and reporting
Later: Advantages and Disadvantages
They have almost identical features and the main function of both Later and Hootsuite is content planning and scheduling, brand monitoring, and analytics. We have taken some reviews from Capterra, TrustRadius, and G2, from the users who use Later and Hootsuite and the users have given different pros and cons based on the usage of both platforms.
Advantage 1: Serviceability
Later has a simple and user-friendly interface. The below screenshot gives an overview of how it’s easy to jump between various features. On the left-hand side, you have a Calendar, media library, Conversations, Analytics, Collect Media, etc and on the lower right-hand side, there is a friendly chatbot to assist you.
There are many positive reviews regarding the user-friendly dashboard of Later. Many verified users from Capterra, TrustRadius, and G2 have given positive reviews to Later.
Advantage 2: Best for Instagram
Most of the features of Later are meant for Instagram. Some of them are explained below:
Visual Planner:
It has a simple visual planner which has a Drag and drop calendar, you can schedule the posting of your content by simply selecting your photos and videos and dropping them onto the calendar with your posting times and they will be published accordingly. You can even see how your profile will look to your followers using the Grid Preview option.
Hashtag tools:
They help you reach new people and provide hashtag suggestions for post topics. Later, they offer a live hashtag feed, allowing you to engage with trending hashtags in real time, enhancing your Instagram strategy.
Personalized insights:
Later suggests the best time to post as it learns when your followers are most engaged.
Handy features to perfect your posts:
You can turn your profile into an Instagram marketing machine using Linkin. bio option. You can use @mentions, user tags, and location tags and schedule your posts. It also has built-in media editing.
Scheduling for all Instagram post types:
Later helps you to create Instagram stories and schedule them at your best time to post.
Tools to find the right content:
User-generated content is a key to a well-rounded Instagram marketing strategy and Later helps to find the right content by @mention, tags,hashtag-even URL. You can also use the Stock photo library from the Later desktop app.
Metrics that matter:
Later gives you all your Instagram analytics in one place and you can measure what matters.
Disadvantage 1: Free plan with fewer features
Later has an unlimited free plan which offers the below features:
- Visual Instagram planner
- Linkin. bio
- Instagram analytics with limited data from the past three months
- Multi-profile content scheduling
- Saved captions
- Media editing
- Media storage
Although in the free version we won’t be able to see the Instagram analytics in detail.
Disadvantage 2: Doesn’t integrate with other tools like Canva
It doesn’t integrate with solutions like Canva, Shopify, Lightroom, etc and offers only basic features like hashtag suggestions and saved captions.
Hootsuite: Advantages and Disadvantages
Hootsuite is also a popular social media management tool and is loved by many social media marketers. But it has its own pros and cons, let’s have a look at them!
Advantage 1: Scheduling
The Hootsuite dashboard simplifies the process of planning, composing, and publishing engaging on-brand content. You can plan your posts with ease by getting an instant overview of published and scheduled content across all the networks in one calendar. You can map out campaigns, fill content gaps and collaborate in real time. It is also possible to suspend all scheduled posts when you need to react to a potential crisis.
Advantage 2: Connects with 20 + social networks
Hootsuite can integrate with multiple social media channels and the most popular ones include Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Tiktok etc. For Facebook, you can stay engaged with your audience and grow your following. For Instagram, you can edit and plan photos, videos, carousels and stories with ease.
Manage and upload original video content to share with your audience. For LinkedIn, you can build your business audience the smart way. On Twitter, you can cut through the noise and engage with the conversations that matter. For Pinterest, you can schedule content, create boards, and pin new ideas. For TikTok, you can schedule videos, manage comments, and build an engaged community of followers. You can also Buy Tiktok comments ,Followers and likes for your uploaded videos.
Disadvantage 1: Fewer features on the free plan
Its free plan has very limited features, you can schedule only 5 messages for two social accounts per user. Users don’t like the limited features of the free plan as there are many reviews about it.
Disadvantage 2: Bugs and errors
Hootsuite gets buggy sometimes. Many users have reviewed it.
Comparison (Later Vs Hootsuite)
We will compare the features of both Later and Hootsuite to let you decide which one you want to choose.
- Analytics
- Integrations
- Pricing
Analytics:
It is very important to stay updated about your social media performance and many social networks have built-in inbound marketing tools like Facebook Page Insights or Instagram Analytics but they are not enough all the time so Later and Hootsuite offer advanced analytics tools which help you in understanding the performance of your content.
The analytics of Later and Hootsuite are explained below:
Later:
Later has an advanced analytics feature for Instagram. It includes profile overview, post performance, stories analytics, traffic and sales, and hashtag analytics.
- Profile overview: You can see your weekly or monthly profile growth, engagement metrics and top performing posts using the analytics dashboard. You can even download all the reports and keep a copy with you or send it to your team.
- Post performance: You can check all the individual posts and see their likes, engagement rate, comments etc
- Stories analytics: You can check the impressions, reach, taps, and completion rate of your stories using Instagram Stories analytics.
- Traffic and sales: The posts which are driving traffic to your site can be measured along with the posts that have resulted in sales.
- Hashtag analytics: Hashtag suggestions are given to you based on your industry using Instagram Hashtag Analytics.
Hootsuite:
Hootsuite helps you to analyze your performance across all the social networks and create reports to check the impact on your brand.
- Analyze with efficiency: You can get a complete view of your results on all social media platforms from a single place and monitor your performance over time. The customizable reports make it easy to analyze the facts and figures that are helpful to your organisation.
- Optimize for better results: You can get actionable insights on the best times to post for building awareness or boosting engagement or driving traffic.
- Find your ROI: You can use Hootsuite Impact to calculate the real return on your social media investment. The customizable dashboards feature gives easy to read graphs, KPI summaries etc.
- Improve customer service and response times: You can track the time your team takes to resolve incoming customer inquiries.
- Make Instagram interactions easy: You can monitor mentions, comments, and tags using a powerful tool called Panoramiq multiview. You can monitor single or many accounts using this tool.
Integrations:
Both Later and Hootsuite integrate with many social media platforms. Let’s find out which social media platforms integrate with Later and Hootsuite!
Later:
Later integrates with the below social media platforms:
- TikTok
It is also an actual official partner of Instagram but there is no integration with Canva and other editing tools which could simplify the content creation process.
Hootsuite:
Hootsuite integrates with 20 + social media networks and some of the popular ones are given below:
- Youtube
- Tiktok
Pricing:
Let’s find out how expensive are Later and Hootsuite?
Later:
Below is the screenshot of the available plans.
There are three plans offered by Later which are pretty affordable and there is a free plan also which doesn’t expire. However, the features offered by the free plan are limited.
Hootsuite:
Below is the screenshot of the plans offered by Hootsuite.
Initially, they had a free plan but later they introduced a free 30-day trial, they offer three plans and a fourth customizable plan as per your social marketing goals.
Conclusion:
We have given a detailed overview of both Later and Hootsuite and compared their features including Analytics, Integrations and Pricing so based on your business needs, budget and goals you can choose the most appropriate one. We have many articles related to digital marketing so if you need more information, you can check our blog.
Also check out our Buzzsumo Alternatives Blog here!
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