Do you use a scheduling platform for your social media marketing?
Chances are, yes, you do. There are many different ones out there and one popular free platform just made recent changes that could affect you.
On October 10, 2017, Hootsuite changed the number of allowable scheduled posts to the free accounts. There is a limit now. If you have a Hootsuite account then you may have seen this message:
“We recently updated the number of messages Free users can schedule at one time to a maximum of 30.
Why the change? Most Free users don’t use unlimited scheduling. By setting a limit, we’re able to offer you other popular features of our Free plan, like managing multiple accounts and analytics.”
According to Hootsuite’s help page, regarding this new change, it means that every post you schedule to your networks counts as one post in the allowable limit. For example, if you schedule a post and choose all 3 networks to send it to, you’re using 3/30 allowable posts on your free account.
I don’t like this new change as I don’t find their prices that great for what you get, if you do upgrade. It doesn’t allow for a lot of posts, however, I guess they’re trying to capitalize on their system that a lot of people use for free.
The next plan up in the system is the Professional plan for $19 a month and you get:
- 10 social profiles
- unlimited scheduling
- 1 user, plus a few other items
If they were going to put in a scheduling system where you don’t need to continually login to schedule your posts then I’d say that’s a great deal. But they’re not, so I don’t think it’s worth it.
I used to use Hootsuite for my own social media marketing but I switched to EClincher.com. It’s an auto-scheduling social media program plus more. MeetEdgar.com is also a popular auto-scheduling program.
I changed social media schedulers back in spring simply for the reason that I don’t want to constantly login and schedule my posts. I found it too time consuming to do this repeatedly week after week. And it’s counter productive when you will eventually use old ones over again.
With EClincher I loaded all of my posts once, selected which social media network it should be sent to, specified the time and date to send the post and then it rotated through the list. Now that the initial setup is complete, when I write fresh content I just add it to the list and voila! It’s done!
There’s different price packages and there’s a 14 day free trial as well, without using a credit card. I find the time alone saved on constantly posting every week worth it.
Now all that said, you don’t have to switch to another scheduler for your social media. However, if you don’t, you will need to count the number of posts you put out each week and either be prepared to logon more than once a week to schedule your 30 posts (which would be cumbersome) or choose a Hootsuite package if you want to stay with them.
