Open Letter to Hootsuite Freemium
Hootsuite are proposing to introduce a choice of fee paying plans to their service which I FULLY support and think they utterly deserve as their product is nothing short of excellent.
However, due to these change it is going to a lot more difficult for me to manage my clients accounts, as I won’t be able to access Hootsuite from a single sign on to see everything from a single ‘place’.
The second piece of ‘bad’ news for me, is that the onus will be one my clients to subscribe, I am not affected but as I was the person to encourage usage of Hootsuite by my clients, it seems unfair that ALL (100%) of my client will be required to pay from this point forwards.
So I wrote the following letter.
Dear Hootsuite,
I remain concerned about the Freemium changes that are coming. I have about 10 clients who I persuaded to use Hootsuite, I set up individual accounts for them and the account ‘belongs’ to them, none would want access to more that the 5 social networks you are offering.
But so that I can help manage their accounts they have listed me as a Team Member… and that is the problem… all my clients have a single Team Member (myself) and they would therefore have to pay at least a Silver service which they really do not need ($20 per month).
My concerns are:
- It is a challenge in itself to persuade companies to check their Hootsuite accounts on top of everything else.
- This effectively means I would have to log into their accounts (as them) to contribute to their efforts, raising privacy and security issues (your Terms and Conditions)
- You claim that 95% of users will be unaffected, but actually 100% of my customers are affected.
- and finally, I am not affected at all, I have less than 5 social networks so for me personally all this means just awkwardness as it severely limits my ability to help companies manage their social networking
The solution to this is simple. It would be wise to allow 1 Team Member on the Freemium version of the Plans. (If a company was enthusiastic it would quickly see the benefit of more Team Members).
The downside, is that probably ALL my customers (who are not big) will just allow their accounts to Languish as the service just isn’t compelling for $240 a year.
From my own point of view the key is in education. I always approach Social Networking as something that has to be done from within the company, I cannot do it for clients, they need to get excited about it themselves. But they need help.
Effectively you’re not allowing a single Team Member in the Freemium is making it (not impossible) but considerably more difficult to do this.
I hope you change your mind and do reconsider. It is after all not I that will not pay – it is 10 businesses that are all potential clients that will not pay.
Yours eveer,
Guy Hoogewerf
Let’s see what response I might achieve… it would be sad to see such a brilliant service pass into backwaters of my client support.
Thanks Justin… I agree about Tweetdeck and it's excellent, I use it too…, but for me the beauty of Hootsuite is the comprehensiveness, particularly Ping as well as the big three, Twitter, Facebook and Linked in… chuck in MySpace and FourSquare and you've got a really good proposition.
Additionally Hootsuite allows you to compartmentalise groups of accounts, ideal if you're running groups of accounts with different focus.
Ultimately you want to make sure that 'ownership' of the social media outflow belongs with the rightful owner… anyone doing 'social media' on behalf of someone else is going to either get it wrong or is missing the point of it all.
Hootsuite is the ONLY service out that that allows marketing people to help their clients/business owners to achieve that…
And that is ultimately where Hootsuite need to direct attention.
My guess is that Hootsuite are keener on large companies than small ones and aren't that bothered about the $20 a month customers.
It is a shame however and their response to you wasn't much cop! From my own point of view as someone who only manages Twitter and Facebook for a couple of clients I much prefer TweetDeck for most purposes predominantly because I find the search function on it to be much better and also I can clear seen Tweets easily.. Only rarely will I use HootSuite, although if I manage many more twitter accounts for others I suspect I will have to use Hootsuite slightly more.
It seems to me that most clients are mainly interested in Twitter and Facebook, so it may be the case that you are better off using Hootsuite for agency purposes and encouraging individual small clients without the large budgets to use TweetDeck.
Thanks Anonymous – you and your 350 clients are just the sort of group that is going to be affected (like myself)… Basically it's all about Team Members.
Rather than chase us 'marketeers' Hootsuite seem to be going for our clients, I cannot understand why? and their reply above doesn't explain much.
MarketMeTweet – you slightly miss my point, sorry, but the brilliance of Hootsuite is that Facebook (and pages), Twitter, LinkedIn and Ping are all covered, few other services allow this AND Account Management. That's the key.
Well I tried… I sent my letter into Hoosuite direct and I was rather interested in the reply. Here is it in FULL
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Support Ranger, Aug 13 09:40 (PDT):
Hi Guy,
Thank you for your thoughtful and thorough email. And thank you for supporting HootSuite and encouraging your clients to do the same. We will not be adding a team member to the free or Bronze plans.
We wish you success with your clients as you move forth with this information.
HootSuit
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I wonder if all this is starting to get to them?
Hey… saw your mashable comment. I'd love if you'd check out MarketMeTweet and write a review 🙂
Best,
Tammy
We are a large PR agency with over 100 staff and currently use Hootsuite. I personally have been a huge and vocal advocate of Hootsuite to my Twitter followers, on my blog and to clients.
I would be happy to pay for a good service, but have real concerns here.
How can you justify 8 team members costing $99 per month, but 9 or more team members costing $1,499 per month? That is utter madness!!
We have teams that manage client accounts, but only a handful with more than 8 people to a team.
BUT…
We want everyone in our agency to have access to manage our own agency Twitter account, but to manage this under the new pricing structure we’d be faced with paying £1.5k per month.
Sorry, your service is good, but not THAT good.
Looks like I’ll be moving the entire agency and all our 350+ clients over to an alternative.
What’s the URL for CoTweet again?
How the hell can they justify $99 for 8 team members then $1499 for 9 or above?! Madness!! Already moving all my clients and colleagues to CoTweet. Big Fail in my opinion.
I got similar problems I'm using 6 or 7 profiles at HootSuite. The smallest bundle for me would be Bronze for 5$/month. That's not much money, but I would rather pay them a one-time only price, let's say 30 or 40$, instead of 60 per year. To make it clear. I would prefer a paying model for "under-professional" users to pay for version 1 and version 2. Like for a desktop app.
FOOTNOTE:
The issue is all about Team Members, for that functionality you need to pay… as a manager of other peoples social media, that functionality is vital… BUT it is not me that has to pay – it will be all the people who use my services, my clients.
Not sure where Hootsuite get the 95% remain free model, but for me it will be 5% Free (only me) everyone else will have to pay…
The loss is really Hootsuite's as it will be they that lose a lot of accounts, because there is no one to manage them.