If you’re a small business owner and use one or more social media platforms regularly, then it’s most likely that you’ll have already heard of Hootsuite. If not, it’s one of the most popular social management tools which can save you valuable time and and also increase your efficiency.
By using the Hootsuite, you’re able to schedule updates to any page or profile you want – whether that’s your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram – all from one place. This is a highly valuable tool for small business owners who recognise the value of using social media, but have limited time to do it and wouldn’t be able to justify hiring someone manage it for them.
Up until now, by signing up for a free account you were able to schedule up to 350 posts at one time. Rather than posting when you get a free moment in your day, you can set some time aside at the beginning of the week and schedule everything in, meaning you can then tweet or post yourself in-between your scheduled content (your content shouldn’t all be scheduled!).
But recently, there have been some changes.
Hootsuite made an announcement that as of October 10, 2017, scheduled messages will be limited to 30 at a time for free users. This means that when you hit that number, you are not able to schedule any more until a message is published or deleted. There is now a counter which tells you how many messages you have left:
 

 
This has of course caused some annoyance to those who have used the platform up until now, scheduling hundreds of messages without an issue, for fee.
Further annoyance has come as the messages are counted per social profile, so if you schedule a message to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, that will count as three scheduled messages. As you can imagine, that quota of 30 is looking pretty slim!
Much like the uproar the Twitter limit change caused, users have taken to Twitter to voice their frustration:
 

 
So, what if you have a free account and this limit is going to cause you a real problem?
Well you could upgrade your account to the Professional Package which is £16 p/m. You can read through what this will allow you in full here, but the main benefits are unlimited scheduling, having up to 10 social media profiles and bulk uploading, which allows you to upload an excel document with your tweets so you can schedule multiple messages with the click of a button instead of adding one at a time.
You will of course need to evaluate whether this upgrade is worthwhile for you and your business.
The other alternative is to use a different tool, such as TweetDeck, which at the moment is still free but only compatible with Twitter, or Buffer which offers a 100 limit for a cheaper $10 per month (around £7.50 p/m).