The social media management tool marketplace is a crowded one. For many small businesses, finding one tool to manage multiple social media profiles, keep you abreast of mentions of certain brand names or keywords, and enable you to engage with mentions or your social audiences can be a big, muddy, confusing mess.
Agorapulse is a relatively new entry into that marketplace and while it does offer a competitive tool, it doesn’t clear up the muddy, confusing mess all that much. It does what the others do. The user experience is a little different. Its pricing isn’t all that much. But they offered me a trial to take a crack at it and here’s what I observed:
- Agorapulse offers one of the more useful features any social media management tool can offer: drag-and-drop calendar management. If you need to change a post from Tuesday to next week, just drag and drop it in a calendar view. The feature isn’t unique to Agorapulse, but it makes a social media management tool very appealing.
- Its keyword monitoring function is basic, but good. Track mentions of your brand, specific people or even phrases you wish to consider engaging with (I tested “bourbon recommendation” so I could find and offer up an answer to anyone who mentioned it.) and get to that easily from your dashboard.
- Speaking of the dashboard, I was disappointed the inbox is tabbed by social networks and not aggregated. So to switch to Facebook, you go to Facebook’s tab and no longer see Twitter. For many community managers, the unified inbox is an incredible tool. So Agorapulse is lacking there.
Reports and measurement are nice in this social media management tool. They pull in the available metrics and present them in a nice way. You can get a flavor of Agorapulse’s reports using their free Facebook Brand Page Barometer or Twitter Report Card.- The super coup d’état in Agorapulse is reports can be exported as PowerPoint files, not just PDFs or HTML reports. That’s a nice bell and whistle you don’t see often.
- Alas, LinkedIn integration is only for publishing, not for reports or analysis.
- Agorapulse also doesn’t yet support Facebook profiles, only brand pages. That’s a non-issue for businesses, but for an individual (like me) who uses his personal Facebook page for a business-personal hybrid, it leaves a gap.
- The tool does offer ad monitoring, Facebook apps and a team workflow feature for the larger subscriptions and all price points come with the core features such as content queues, automated moderation and such. So there’s some power under the hood, even at the entry-level price point.
And speaking of price point, this is one area I thought Agorapulse might compete, but it left me a little non-reactive. The basic account features three social profiles and one user for $49. That’s not bad and quite acceptable for most small businesses. But the next level up is $99 for 10 social accounts which puts it dead even with most competitors in the space. The enterprise level price tag is $299 (40 profiles and 12 users). That’s more expensive than some and, for the most part, doesn’t come with additional bells or whistles platforms like SproutSocial don’t have.
UPDATE (May 24, 2019): Pricing has been revised as of May 2019. The lowest price point is now $99 per month ($79 if you pay annually). But there’s a bunch of new features, including LinkedIn company and Instagram features. So while it’s disappointing the $49 price point isn’t there anymore, they’re making it better and are still on-par with similar tools. (End of Update)
Agorapulse also graduates data retention. You get two months of saved data with the lower cost, 24 months with the higher accounts. I don’t know of others that cut you off on what data you can keep, though I could be ignorant of it in other platforms.
But the PowerPoint output is cool.
Do I think Agorapulse has a nice tool? Yes. It’s easy to navigate, has all the basic features you’d want in a social media management tool and has a few unique features that can make your business’s management of the social channels more effective.
Do I think it’s exceptional in the marketplace? Not really. But do give it a look see. It is competitive and in the right hands can be powerful.
Check them out at Agorapulse.com.