It wouldn't be an overstatement to suggest that social media is at the front and center of the digital marketing industry. And keeping up with the ever-changing trends, digital marketers have a host of powerful tools for social media at their disposal. These tools have made the task of marketing through social media channels extremely rewarding and less complicated. Among the most sought-after tools in the last few years, some names that would make it to most lists are Sendible, Social Pilot, Hootsuite, Buffer and many more.
Let's talk a bit about these tools.
Arguably one of the fastest growing and highly popular social media tools, Hootsuite serves as a powerful weapon in any marketers arsenal. The sheer capabilities it has to offer truly justify the fact that it has been lapped up with such eagerness my the online marketing industry since the day of its inception.
Now, while there are brands who are yet to establish their presence on the different social media websites, there are also B2C as well as B2B businesses who have their brand pages operating on multiple websites. However, since one can only find so much time to cater to the diverse audience on the different platforms, it becomes challenging for businesses to keep up and keep all their social media accounts active and running.
You can see it all around you - businesses who are very active on their Facebook pages, publishing multiple posts a day but end up ignoring other accounts on Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, etc. So while they may be getting decent traction from Facebook, they are losing out on a valuable audience that would have come in from the other platforms, particularly if it is a kind of brand that has a larger volume of its target audience on LinkedIn rather than on Facebook or Pinterest. This is where Hootsuite steps in and proves to be the social media savior for a business. Using Hootsuite enables you to set up queues for different posts to go out and then basically have them run on autopilot. The entire process of drafting a post to adding it to a queue becomes seamless.
Not just posting updates, but Hootsuite also helps you monitor the brand mentions on the different platforms, reply to comments, and basically have enhanced engagements with your users.
Sendible is another great social media marketing platform that can help brands engage with their audience across multiple social media channels at time of their choice.
Sendible enables you to sync up all your social media accounts so that it becomes a far easier job to schedule and post updates that go live on the different accounts simultaneously, in just one click, and without you having to open the different accounts individually and then repeat the posting process.
As a business platform, it empowers marketers to get a handle on how they can increase their social media reach through monitoring features, analytics feature, reporting capabilities and much more. Irrespective of the size and scale of your business or the industry that you belong to, Sendible is a tool for anyone who wishes a seamless way to manage multiple networks.
SocialPilot
SocialPilot is one more the most powerful and advanced social media marketing tool that is designed to enhance growth and effective brand engagement through the use of modern and user-friendly tools and capabilities it offers.
SocialPilot is integrated fully with a host of social networks that helps users to schedule posts, engage their customers, track and monitor ROI, use advanced reporting feature - all from an easy-to-use dashboard.
Apart from the tools mentioned above, there are many more that have gained prominence in the realm of social media marketing. But there is a new player in the market that, in spite of all the existing competition, is making heads turn. That tool goes by the name of Agorapulse.
A new kid on the block - Agorapulse
As discussed earlier, the market is filled with social media management tools already. If a product offers X features, the competitor products offer X+1 features. That said, Agorapulse is emerging to be the kind of product that is giving all-round capabilities to marketers by ticking all the boxes. It is a robust social media management tool that serves as a perfect asset for your business in the cut-throat competition world of online marketing.
Let's have a glance at the various features that Agorapulse offers.
Boosting user engagement
It's one thing to have a sizeable number of fans on your social media page, and another to keep them engaged, having them indulge in conversation with you or each other about your brand. This is where Agorapulse truly scores.
The notifications feature of Agorapulse is a highly resourceful feature that keeps you on top of every comment or message you receive from your followers. If you have a huge fan following, you can rest assured that this feature can help you cut through all the clutter and find a semblance of sense among the chaos. The content flowing in from all the accounts is combined and contained at once place so that you do not find it hassling when replying, reviewing or reading out all the messages.
Get everything under one roof
As mentioned earlier, it is a challenge to keep sync between the different social media channels that any business has created in order to be able to reach audience scattered over different platforms. But Agorapulse unifies your efforts by providing the facility to schedule and publish posts across all the social channels from just one place. So you can close all those multiple tabs on your browser and use this multiple-platform management feature to get the message across seamlessly and effectively.
Listen in to the conversations about your business
Social media management is not fully utilized by a brand that believes in either one-way communication or pays attention to the conversations solely happening on the platforms owned by it. When it comes to pitching yourself for best results online, you have to listen in to what your potential and existing customers are talking about in context to your brand. This is the best way to pick on your audience's mind and get the most honest feedback possible.
Agorapulse helps you achieve this by giving you the capability to monitor every hashtag, trends within your industry, what influencers are saying, etc. When you get to know what is it about your product or service that delights your customers or leaves them fumed, there are a whole lot of ways you can use that insight for improving your services.
Collaborate seamlessly and effectively
All the technological and financial capabilities aside, one efficiency rule that will never cease to matter is teamwork. When people within and outside the team collaborate on a task or project, the efficiency is multiplied by several orders. Agorapulse enables flexible and real-time collaboration with individuals within your team as well as those from the other teams that work closely with you. And it's not just within an organization; you can also collaborate with your clients or outside agencies.
To talk more about the real-time collaboration, what happens is when you log into your account, you have the view of who from your team is creating or reviewing a piece of content at the moment. Like you may have done with Google Spreadsheets, you can track every change or addition made to a post by any team member.
Measure metrics that truly make a difference
The reporting feature in Agorapulse is on the point and yet elaborate. There is no denying the fact that professionals in any business spend a lot of hours collecting reports, fully knowing that this time could have been utilized performing core functions. Agorapulse frees professionals from the reporting responsibilities through its intuitive and instant reports.
When the time comes to show the return on investments to your client, don't be concerned with having to work around a complicated reporting setup. You can view the report in your browser with just a single click. The feature is also provided to export the report to PowerPoint.
Target the right audience and divide it into segments
Agorapulse empowers you to turn a group of disparate strangers into a well-knit community of followers who trust you and who you can trust. With any scope or scale of a marketing campaign, targeting the right audience enhances the results and gives more purpose to your campaign. By choosing the very specific audience that should receive your content, you are ensuring your posts are not shown to people who are not a good fit.
With any form of marketing - online or offline - what matters the most is that you understand the audience that you are marketing your products to. With Agorapulse, identifying this audience and getting a clear-eyed idea of their behavior becomes easy. Agorapulse helps you deep dive into analysing your audience and understanding them fully, to make sure that your campaigns are tailor-made for them. You can then proceed to segment your campaigns based on the characteristics identified with respect to this audience - like their demographics, the user-behavior, the stage on the sales funnel they are at, their annual spend, etc. The best outcome of using this feature is that you can build a great relationship with your customer, enhance interactions with them, show them that you care by adding more personalization to the nature of your communication.
As feature-packed as Agorapulse is, it comes at great prices. Every package supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
The pricing plans for Agorapulse come in two forms - monthly billed plans and annual billed plans.
For both forms, there are four types of plans:
Monthly plan at $49 per month and Annual plan at $39 per month
Businesses that are starting on a very small scale or individuals who are promoting their websites to a sizeable audience can use this most economical plan that comes with attractive features, like the facility to manage 3 social profiles, with capabilities like publishing, report monitoring, Chrome extensions, Social CRM, etc. As per the plan, only one user can work on the tool at a time.
Monthly plan at $99 per month and Annual plan at $79 per month
Under this plan, users can manage up to 10 social profiles. In addition to the features provided under the Small plan, Medium plan also offers 6 months of data retention, Advanced Sync, Ad comments monitoring for up to 10 comments, etc. Small businesses can get great value for money with this plan. It supports collaboration up to between 3 users.
Monthly plan at 199$ per month and Annual plan at $159 per month
As the name suggests, this one is a plan bigger in both cost and scope. Touching the 200 Dollar mark for the monthly plan, this package allows you data retention for up to 24 months, ad comment monitoring for up to 40 comments, Team Workflow and all the features that are part of other packages. Looking at the features and price range, this plan sounds perfect for agencies that can manage up to 25 profiles with this plan, which supports real-time collaboration up to between 6 users.
Enterprise
Monthly plan at 299$ per month and Annual plan at $239 per month
Organizations with large-scale operations catering to a huge audience can buy the Enterprise plan that caters to all their social media management needs in a manner most efficient. With the ability to manage up to 40 social profiles, the Enterprise plan allows up to 12 users to work collaboratively and lets ad comment monitoring for up to 100 comments.
GDPR Update: AgoraPulse is compliant with GDPR so if you are still wondering about using it or not you can do it after reading and going through their new GDPR updates. It is always a good idea to consult your legal team before landing onto any GDPR related conclusions.
Free Social Media Marketing Tools
So looking at the features explained above, one may have had an idea how resourceful Agorapulse is as a social media tool, but what well and truly makes it stand apart from the competition is the range of its free social media marketing tools. These tools take the usability and resourcefulness quotient of Agorapulse several notches higher.
If you are someone looking to get maximum returns on minimum efforts, these tools are perfect for you.
Facebook Barometer
With this tool, you can deep-dive into your Facebook stats to understand the pulse of your audience and track the reach and engagement levels on your Facebook page, without having to work your way through the tedious spreadsheets.
The Facebook Barometer tool serves as a perfect resource for you to measure up your performance against your competition and thus get an insight into what works better for them, what gets you bigger results, and what is it that you can try to replicate on your page.
Twitter Report Card
This tool performs largely similar functions as mentioned above on Twitter. Using Twitter Report Card, you can hold up your tweets against those from the competition and analyze who among you are getting more traction - you or your competition. This way, you can figure out the messaging that should go out through your tweets. It is useful to understand what will drive your target users to perform an action you want them to perform, which drives more engagement from them, what gets more likes and retweets, etc.
Facebook Page Contests
Contests on Facebook pages are powerful tools for any brand which has a large audience on Facebook. But designing and implementing contests is a job that requires elaborate setup and knowledge of the market. Eventually, you are spending hard cash, so you wouldn't want to design a campaign that is not pitched to generate a lot of interest.
With this feature by Agorapulse, creating contests becomes easier. You get to choose from a variety of templates, for different kinds of contests - whether they are photo contests, quiz, sweepstakes or anything else.
It's not just easy to design and create contests, but you can easily filter through the entries and decide who is the winner.
How Agorapulse alternatives match up
Social media management remains a mode of online marketing that is expanding, and so there are many players out there that are providing marketers the options to choose what suits them best.
So apart from the expensive tools like Hootsuite, there are many other tools that pack a powerful punch without digging a hole too deep in your pockets. One can say that they are decent alternatives to Agorapulse, but before one gets to decide on that, let us see a side by side comparison between Agorapulse and three of the best alternatives available.
Agorapulse vs Loomly
Previously known by the name Calendy, Loomly is a very useful a social media management tool for marketers to create and schedule posts to be published on the different social media accounts of a company, which include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn. The interface of Loomly is very user-friendly and features are very inventive. As a user, you can really find great value in features that help you analyze and approve or reject comments, run ads on certain posts, track the performance of posts, preview the posts before they go out, and so on and so forth.
When it comes to comparing it with Agorapulse, both can be run on desktop or as mobile apps. As for who these tools are for, whether you are just starting out with your business or have a huge enterprise and multiple social media accounts, both Agorapulse and Loomly can add great ease and value to your efforts.
Some of the difference between the tools that can be highlighted here are is that unlike with Agorapulse, Loomly does not offer you the gamification feature, which can be a highly engaging feature in context of your followers and keep them engaged with your page. Loomly also lacks the Geolocation feature of Agorapulse, and this limits its segmentation capabilities. As a marketer, you want to be on top of how users from different locations view your posts. Geolocation is a very important aspect of marketing segmentation. Loomly also scores over Agorapulse in certain aspects, like it allows for email integration and enables other email-centric features like email alerts, reminders and invitations, etc.
Agorapulse vs Sendible
Sendible, as mentioned and explained earlier, is another highly recommended social media management tool. The fact that it can sync up all your social media accounts, which makes it easy to schedule and post content across the different social media accounts owned by your company is something that every business user wants.
On comparing Sendible with Agorapulse, because both the tools have a huge user base, there is the scope to compare reviews. As per the comparisons drawn up by G2Crowd, Agorapulse trumps Sendible in a variety of ways. The ease of setting up Agorapulse is much more than than with Sendible, and same goes for the ease of user parameter. Identifying the influencers in your relevant circle is an exercise that is more rewarding with Agorapulse as compared to with Sendible. On the parameters such as social listening, social analytics, social measurement and social ads, Agorapulse again edges past Sendible.
Two of the very important features that are missing in Sendible but present in Agorapulse are activity tracking and click through tracking. However, one of the chief areas where Sendible scores higher is the reporting feature. Sendible offers greater reporting customization. And that's not it; the integrations of Sendible with other tools gets better reviews from users.
Agorapulse vs SocialPilot
As stated at the beginning, SocialPilot is a fast-growing and an all-inclusive social media marketing tool that can be used by individuals as well as huge businesses.
When it comes to user engagement, while both Agorapulse and SocialPilot have the respective capabilities, Agorapulse makes it easy to engage with the page followers or track their engagement. The segmentation feature of Agorapulse also stands tall in comparison to that of SocialPilot. It gives you better actionable insights since you are able to get a good grasp of who your audience is, thus making you more equipped to design campaigns that are suited to their preferences and conversion-oriented behavior. In short, it empowers you to nudge users to take a sales-focussed action.
Agorapulse also makes it a more worthwhile exercise to measure and track the performance of your social marketing efforts through a more robust reporting feature. One advantage of using SocialPilot over Agorapulse is the cost savings you make. SocialPilot comes with a free plan, which they call SocialPilot Lite, and their basic plan is also priced at a far lower number than is the case with Agorapulse.
As an online marketer, the question that that you are asking yourself is this - Which is the best software for me?
After having taken an in-depth look at multiple tools, exploring their individual features, considering each and every pro and con, it can we can conclude that Agorapulse comes out as a tool that outshines other competing products on the most critical parameters, such as such as social listening, seamless collaboration, and precise targeting. You would simply love this tool for the kind of visual ease and appeal it offers. Do give it a try though before signing up.
