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Are you struggling to maintain your social media marketing strategy on your own and aren’t sure what tool to turn to?
In this post, we review one of our favorite social media management tools available in the marketing industry.
Agorapulse helps you manage every aspect of social media marketing. We’re going to take a look at its publishing and inbox capabilities especially.
What is Agorapulse?
Agorapulse is a fully-fledged social media management app. It’s a comparable option for those looking for a cheaper alternative to Sprout Social. Like the latter app, Agorapulse offers four core functionalities for social media management: publishing, inbox, monitoring and reporting.
We’ll cover these features more in depth in a moment. For now, take a look at this overview of Agorapulse’s top features:
- Supports Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube
- Plans with over 40 social media profiles
- Plans with over eight users
- Unlimited scheduled posts per month + bulk scheduling
- Content labels (tagging)
- Social media calendar
- Inbox functionalities include priority tagging, advanced filtering and automation
- Monitor mentions, keywords and hashtags
- Assign and approve posts
- Share calendars to users outside of Agorapulse, such as clients
- Social CRM functionalities, including customer interaction history, internal notes on customers, labels for grouping users and a ranking system that showcases your most active followers
- Monitor ad comments
- Reports include Facebook competitors and data on team member performance
- Library to store assets
- Browser extension you can use to share any post you like to social media
What features does Agorapulse offer?
When you first use Agorapulse, even as a free trial user, you’ll need to run through their setup wizard. This involves telling them about your organization and connecting your profiles.
This is when you find out Agorapulse supports Facebook pages, Facebook groups, Instagram business profiles, Twitter profiles, LinkedIn profiles, LinkedIn company pages, YouTube channels and Google My Business profiles.
Agorapulse offers quite a few features, as you can see. We’re going to cover them in the following sections:
- Dashboard
- Publishing
- Social Inbox
- Social Listening
Dashboard
Agorapulse’s interface is clean and even simpler than Sprout Social’s.
It has a thin, left-hand sidebar menu that contains links to different sections of the app along with a few quick-action buttons. These allow you to compose new posts, invite team members, add new profiles, view your notifications, and consult support and help docs in fewer clicks.
There’s also a collapsible menu to the right of the main menu. This one features profiles you’ve connected to the app, and you can select or deselect each one depending on the tool you’re using.
Different tools also have different UI layouts.
One thing to note about Agorapulse is that it doesn’t have a home screen or main dashboard, so there’s no way to view a snapshot of your latest mentions, scheduled posts, approvals that need your attention or performance metrics.
Publishing
Agorapulse’s publishing tool is in a few different parts. Let’s start with the compose functionality. When you click the Publish button, you’ll see this tool’s UI overlay over the screen.
Agorapulse uses one of the simplest UIs for its compose tool, simpler than most social media management tools out there. It has three panels: from left to right, the first one allows you to select which platform(s) you’d like to publish to, the second one contains the editor and the third has previews. Each platform has its own tab in the preview panel.
This layout makes it incredibly efficient to schedule posts that contain the same marketing messages for multiple social media platforms, all while composing a single draft.
As you type, you’ll see separate word count limits for each platform you want to publish to. This allows you to optimize your message for each individual platform.
Plus, you can edit individual messages in the preview panel. This is a step up from Sprout Social’s compose tool, which requires you to create separate drafts when you want your messages to appear different on different platforms. With Agorapulse, you can make these changes from the same UI.
These different tabs even have their own error-free messages for each platform. For example, when you include a link as your only attachment, you may get an error message about Instagram images needing to be at specific aspect ratios.
Fortunately, there are quick-use buttons that enable you to include emojis, links, images, videos and hashtag groups.
Hashtag groups are hashtag collections you can create and save within Agorapulse. When you compose a new post, you can insert all hashtags within a group in a few simple clicks using the hashtag button in the editor.
Scheduling and queuing posts
When you’re done composing your post, you have four options in terms of actually publishing it: publish immediately, add it to your queue, schedule it or assign it to anyone (including yourself) to save it as a draft.
Like I said, the compose tool’s UI is simple, so the scheduling/queuing interfaces are kept as separate steps. This is smart from a design perspective as it prevents the user from being overwhelmed by too many options at once.
This, of course, simplifies the interfaces for the scheduling/queuing steps. For scheduling, all you need to do is select a date and time you’d like to schedule the post for.
Some platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, allow you to schedule posts for additional time slots or republish them regularly.
You can assign labels to posts on both interfaces, a nifty addition that lets you use tagging for internal organization. Assign labels for content types (blog posts, videos, etc.), internal content categories and more.
If you want to queue a post, you can assign it to the top or bottom of the queue. Plus, like scheduling, certain platforms allow you to re-queue content, which is useful for evergreen marketing messages.
Publishing lists
Agorapulse’s queue function is stored within a section of the app called Publishing Lists. This section organizes your posts into five categories based on status: Scheduled, Queued, To Approve, Assigned to Me and Published.
You can create different categories for the Queue and assign color labels to each. For instance, you can create a category for your own blog posts, another for content you want to share, one for quotes, and so on and so forth.
All you need to do is select the days and times of the week you’d want posts in each queue category to publish live on social media. Any post you assign to the queue will follow its respective category’s schedule.
Publishing calendar
Finally, we have the Publishing Calendar. It’s a simple social media calendar showcasing all of the posts you’ve scheduled for the week or month.
You can schedule new posts from here and drag and drop posts to different dates.
Social media inbox
One of Agorapulse’s most useful features is the way it helps you manage your social media inbox. You can manage direct messages, comments, ad comments and reviews.
The tool’s UI makes it easy to respond to messages and assign them to different team members. However, you’ll see where this tool truly shines if you open the settings page.
There’s a feature called the Inbox Assistant here. You can use this to set up rules for the app to follow in regards to inbox items. It’s essentially an auto-sort feature you control.
You set up these rules based on keywords that appear in the messages you receive. For instance, you can create different rules that automatically delete comments containing offensive words.
Social Listening
Back on the settings page, you’ll see there’s a section labelled Listening for certain platforms, including Instagram and Twitter. This section allows you to monitor mentions of specific keywords and phrases.
Your handles and website are added as keywords by default, but you can monitor any keyword, website or hashtag.
All you need to do is enter words, phrases or handles you want to track, then do the same for ones you want to exclude. If you’re tracking brand mentions, you can use this tool to add users to your Fans & Followers list automatically.
Language and location requirements are also available.
Once you start receiving messages, you’ll find them on the main Social Listening dashboard.
Agorapulse pros and cons
Agorapulse shines when it comes to social media publishing and inbox management. Being able to create posts for multiple platforms (with word counts for each included) from a single draft is one of the most efficient ways to manage your publishing schedule.
You’ll no longer need to log into each individual social media platform and create the same marketing message over and over again for each one. Plus, Agorapulse has a clean UI that’s easy to use, so it’s probably miles ahead of whatever social media management app you’re currently using.
Agorapulse extends this UI in their inbox tool. You can manage DMs, comments and reviews from all platforms in a single place, using filter options to control the types of messages you tackle first.
The inclusion of the Inbox Assistant just makes this feature that much more efficient.
Agorapulse also has extensive reports for every platform you use. You can keep an eye on audience growth, engagement, user activity, your brand awareness score, keywords you’re monitoring, interactions generated by hashtags you use in your posts and label distribution.
You can also export reports to show clients and team members or to keep your own records.
Minor inconveniences you may experience with Agorapulse:
Agorapulse has no variant functionality. When you schedule new posts, you can’t create different versions of them to share at different times.
Fortunately, you can create new posts by duplicating existing ones. It’s not as efficient, but it is a decent compromise.
You also can’t leave notes on scheduled posts from the calendar. While you can communicate with your team by assigning posts, you can’t add reminders and descriptions (even for yourself) for quick viewing.
There’s also no proper draft functionality. The only way to create a post and save it without scheduling or queuing it is to assign it to someone.
And that’s it – no significant issues at all.
Note: Agorapulse are in the process of rebuilding their social publishing tool. So we should see improvements in that area soon.
Agorapulse pricing
Agorapulse has a limited free forever plan for smaller, solo marketers. This plan supports up to three social profiles, 40 scheduled posts a month, content labels and basic inbox functionality, sans Twitter sync.
Agorapulse has two paid plans named Pro and Premium as well as custom Enterprise plans for larger businesses and agencies.
Pricing for Pro starts at $99/month or $948/year ($79/month). This plan supports up to 10 profiles, two users and unlimited scheduled posts. It also unlocks the rest of the app’s social media management suite.
The Premium plan costs $199/month or $1,908/year ($159/month). You get up to 20 social profiles and four users to start out with. However, you can purchase up to 35 additional profiles at $12/profile and up to eight users at $30/user.
You also get the ability to assign and approve posts as well as share calendars.
Agorapulse has a free, 30-day trial. Your trial account will say “15 days” when you first log in. This is because the trial is renewable for another 15 days (for a total of 30 days) on a one-time basis.
Agorapulse review: final thoughts
So far, Agorapulse is one of the best social media management apps we’ve tested. It has a wonderful balance of features, pricing and support.
It allows you to manage all aspects of your social media marketing strategy more efficiently without breaking the bank in the way Sprout Social does. It’s especially a great option for teams for this reason, giving you access to two users for the same price as Sprout Social’s base, one-user plan.
Its free plan even has enough features for smaller marketers to manage their schedules and inboxes.
Platforms like SocialBee are also rich in features when it comes to social media publishing. However, Agorapulse is a better option if you need to manage your inbox, monitor brand and keyword mentions, and view advanced reports on performance. It’s an entire social media management suite whereas SocialBee is a scheduling tool exclusively.
Overall, Agorapulse is great value for money. But if you’re unsure, try Agorapulse’s free trial. No credit card required.
Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. This means we may make a small commission if you make a purchase.
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