The Hidden Pricing of Social Media Tools Revealed

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The Hidden Limits

As you will have seen, not all prices, features and limitations are listed or easy to spot when you view tool company websites.
Sometimes you won’t find out that you’ve hit a limit until it is too late! If only you had known that before you had invested all that time and money in the tool.

Followers & Fans Limitations

Both Hootsuite and Agorapulse don’t put any limitations on how many fans and followers you have across your social profiles. However, there are limits on Sprout Social plans. If your Facebook page and Twitter accounts are very popular, you may find that the 100,000 total on the Deluxe Plan or the 200,000 on the Premium Plan aren’t enough. The Enterprise plan, however, doesn’t have an upper limit.

Reporting Limitations

Agorapulses gives access to all reports on all plans. The Custom plan gives you 24 months of data while the Premium gives you 12 months, the Pro gives you 6 months and the Free plan gives you 1 month.

With Hootsuite Professional you get 1 basic report included although you can purchase extra credits for other reports each month. Some reports are only available on the Enterprise plan such as Twitter & Facebook Aggregate.

With the basic Deluxe plan from Sprout Social you have unlimited access to some reports. The Engagement & Trends reports are only available if you upgrade to the Premium plan and higher. The Twitter Listening, Team, Task Performance and Tag Reports are only available if you upgrade to the Team or Enterprise plans.

You can view the reports available on the different plans for Sprout here:

Twitter Search Limitations

While Hootsuite and Agorapulse don’t put any limit to the number of Twitter searches you can add, Sprout does limit the number. You get 5 searches per profile on the Deluxe Plan, 10 on the Premium and Team and 20 on the Enterprise.

Support Limitations

When things go wrong, you’ll want to have the peace of mind of knowing you can contact support. I’ve assumed a response within 4 hours as acceptable, but you may have different thoughts! Enterprise plans may have a quicker response, but I’d recommend asking the tool company about this.

All Sprout Social and Agorapulse plans come with fast support. Hootsuite has fast support on the Business plan on above. To get support on Hootsuite Pro, you’ll need to pay $6/user/month. There’s also a live chat help desk

Team management Limitations

If you have a team of people managing your social networks, you’ll want to give them all different logins. Sharing user credentials is a security nightmare and bad practice. What if one of the team members goes AWOL? They still have access to your social dashboard! Not good.

All 3 tools offer the facility to add multiple team members – all with their own logins. They all have limits, and the price goes up depending on how many team members. With Hootsuite, you no longer have team options with the Professional plan. If you want more than 1 user, you'll need up upgrade. The Team plan allows up to 5 users. Sprout Social is more flexible and you can add extra users no matter which plan you are on. With Agorapulse you only get 1 user with the free plan and 2 users with the pro plan. If you want more users, you'll need to upgrade to the premium plan (which includes 4 users) or the Enterprise plan (which includes 8+).

However, to get the most out of your team, you really need team management features. With this, you can assign different roles to your team such as an admin, editor and moderator. Team members can assign tasks to each other and you as an admin or editor can approve content.

This is available with Agorapulse on the Premium Plan upwards. It’s available with Hootsuite on the Team, Business and Enterprise plans and on the Team and Enterprise Plans with Sprout Social.

Custom URL Limitations

Custom URLs allow you to brand your shortened URLs and track clicks across your channels. I use to.iag.me as my shortened URL on Twitter for example (I use bit.ly for this service). Sprout Social and Agorapulse give you custom URLs on all their plans and integrate with bit.ly – meaning you can use the same custom URL with other tools.

Hootsuite, on the other hand charges you $50/month for a custom URL on the pro plan. It’s included in the Business and Enterprise plans. Since the custom URL uses Hootsuite’s ow.ly shortener, you can’t use it outside of Hootsuite.

For more information see my article on building an awareness with short domains:

Other Hidden Features

There are likely to be other hidden features I haven’t mentioned. Examples could include advanced stuff such as a dedicated account manager, APIs and more.

It’s always best to speak with the tool company’s sales department and do your own research. However, I hope this article makes your job significantly easier!