AgoraPulse Review

Detailed Reviews

Agorapulse is one stop solution for all your social media woes. This French company has employees and customers all around the globe. It provides a single interface for multiple social media accounts of the user to aid management and facilitate better interaction with the audiences.

Pros

• Simple scheduling: Scheduling is one of the most powerful features of this application. It lets you manage social media posts well in advance. It gives you better control over the profiles.
• Re-posting: Agorapulse allows you to repeat your posts at pre-defined intervals of time. This is especially helpful during campaigns. It removes the labor of repeating the same process again and again as it happens in case of other social media managers.
• Resourceful reports: You get plenty of reports on various aspects related to your profiles. The reports take care of all the labels and tags that you attach on posts and comments.
• Customer support: They provide excellent customer support services to the customer. You can expect someone to get back to you in a few hours once you report the issue. The representatives are competent enough to guide you through the problems.

Cons

• Room for more platforms: Agorapulse does not provide support For Pinterest. Some of the other popular platforms can be included as well. These inclusions will make it a better tool for social media management.
• Can’t crop images: The tool does not allow one to crop images for Instagram or make any other trivial changes. The service provider should try to eliminate the need to leave the platform as much as possible.
• No chat option for the team: A chat option for team members will allow the team to function efficiently.
• Exports in PowerPoint: All the reports can be exported in PowerPoint slides only. PowerPoint is not among the best ways to share reports. The service provider should provide more formats to export files.

Introduction

Social media management is just as crucial for an individual as it is for a big organization. The bigger you are on the internet, the more complicated it becomes for you to manage the different accounts.

The intent behind using all these platforms is to reach as many people as possible. The prime focus is to remain visible on the internet and maintain a cordial relationship with the audience.

Social media management tools such as Agorapulse provide you with a way to take care of all your social media accounts at once. It integrates your different accounts into one and allows you to manage them collectively.

Some of the standard features present on such tools are that they let you publish posts, manage comments, and generate various reports for your accounts.

There may also be a few exclusive features here and there on different management tools, but what sets them apart is their efficiency.

In this review, we will try to see how efficient Agorapulse is when it comes to social media management. We will go through all the factors which contribute to this trait.

The user interface, data management, evaluation reports, and other similar factors will come into play. We will gauge Agorapulse against other social media management tools and see if it manages to come out on top.

Adding accounts

The first thing you should know is the social media accounts which are integrable with Agorapulse. Well, the answer is simple.

You can use this tool for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can integrate these profiles on your Agorapulse account with a few clicks and key depending on the security practices you use.

You can integrate multiple accounts from the same platform. The total number of integrable profiles depends on your subscription plan. We will discuss them in the following sections of the review.

Internet is flooded with social media platforms, and a lot of them are not available on Agorapulse. There are still a few more popular platforms which need to be included in this tool.

Addition of more platforms will help this tool attract more users.

There can be a few complications when you add different accounts from the same platform. For instance, Twitter prevents simultaneous publication of identical content from two different accounts.

Publishing

Once you are done integrating your accounts, you can start publishing content from it, and there are multiple ways to do it.

You can choose the accounts on which you want to publish the content. All the profiles get selected for publication by default. If you don’t want to post content on any one of them, you can uncheck the box in front of that profile.

You need to type in the content only once, and it automatically reflects into all the profiles. However, you need to take care of word limits for different profiles. You can also get a preview of the content in different profiles under their respective tabs.

The Instagram tab has a unique option through which you can get a notification on your mobile phone before the post goes live. You can include filters and other Instagram items before you publish the content.

However, some users consider it as an inability of this tool. You cannot perform a lot of tasks such as cropping images, posting stories, etc.

But it will not be fair to blame the application for all of this as some of the limitations exist because of the API of Instagram.

One can create different labels for posts which makes it easy to identify and the sort them on the calendar. You can have a weekly or a monthly view of your posting schedule on the calendar.

Agorapulse color codes the posts on the calendar which makes them easily identifiable.

However, it is not the color coding of posts which has made this application so popular. It is the posting and scheduling options which make it a powerful content management application.

You will get three options when you decide to post content.

First one will be to publish it right at the moment. It is straightforward. You add content, media, hashtags, etc. and then publish it instantly across all the selected social media profiles.

The second option is to publish it in your queue cycle. You can add various queue categories which have fixed days and time slots to release content on the platforms.

Having a queue set up for your profiles helps maintain consistency and increase user loyalty as well. You can select either the end of the queue or its beginning to place the post.

They also provide an option to re-queue content multiple times. This feature sets Agorapulse apart from the rest of social media management tools. None of them make it this easy to repost content.

The third option is scheduling. You can schedule content for a later date and time. It allows the user to repost content in this method as well.

You can repost at fixed intervals of time or make custom slots for subsequent reposts. Some of the popular social media management tools such as Hootsuite fail to provide such a useful feature.

A lot of other features such as sending the post for approval before publishing it, saving hashtag categories, etc. make it a powerful management tool.

Agorapulse facilitates the bulk posting of content as well. You can import CSV files, documents, and media files to put in a large volume of content on this platform.

The efficient techniques to include and schedule content across profile make life a lot easier and stress-free for the content managers.

One cannot have a lot of complaints from the publication options on Agorapulse.

Comments and messages

Posting content on social media is just one of the facets of an online presence. The people who follow you or go through your posts, often have something to say about it.

Some may want to compliment you on the excellent job you have been doing, some may have a question for you, and there also may be some who want to express how unhappy they are with your services or work.

Now it is totally up to you if you want to engage with these individuals or not. But we all know how important it is to interact with the audiences for maintaining a positive social media presence.

The statements are true for individuals as well as organizations. You will want to appreciate the kind comments, answer the queries, and interact with the negative ones to improve upon your mistakes if any.

But that is a lot easier said than done. Inboxes and comments are not easy to deal with as there are so many of them and at so many different places.

Agorapulse displays all the mentions, comments, messages, and other interactive content at one place to help the user deal with them. It includes comments from Facebook ads as well.

If you don’t like all this content in one place, then they have got filter options for you. You can choose to see just the comments or only the private messages if you want. It is an efficient way to prioritize tasks if you rate messages and comments differently.

The filter has items such as labels, bookmarks, reviewed, and assigned. We will need to discuss how this application lets us interact with the inbox content in order to understand these filter elements.

You can choose the profile whose inbox content you want to review. The first tab in the inbox section is ‘To Review,’ and it shows all those messages and comments which you have still not attended. Generally, you will want to go through these ones first and try to keep this tab empty.

Every message has a ‘review’ and ‘like’ icon. When you press the ‘review’ icon, the message will vanish from the tray, and you will have one less message to deal with.

If you click on the message, it will appear in an adjacent window with all its context. You will know if there have been previous interactions, if someone else from the team was involved in those conversations, etc.

You will have options to reply, add bookmarks, assign the message to some other member of the team, label it, etc. The application allows you to reply in the inbox of the person even if it was a public comment.

These multiple options to interact with the messages allow a lot more flexibility in the management of accounts. Unlike other social media management tools where people find it challenging to keep up with the piled-up inboxes, Agorapulse lets its users stay on top of the situation.

The inbox assistant lets the user automate some of the functions as well. You can create rules in which you assign specific direction for a message if it contains the keywords you include in the rule.

For instance, you can create a rule called ‘question,’ which will let’s say assign the message to member-A of the team if it contains any of the specified keywords. For keywords, you can choose what, when, where, who, why, and all other terms suitable to this rule.

You can filter spam and other categories of messages in a similar fashion.

In spite of so many features to interact with the messages, there is still some room for improvement on the application.

One can only ‘like’ the messages, and the application does not provide other interaction options which are available on Facebook. We would like to see Agorapulse include this feature in its quiver as well.

This particular section on this platform has been the most impressive. It is much better at handling the inbox content as compared to its rivals.

Social media monitoring

We discussed how you could use this application to manage posts interact with the audiences. But it is not necessary that people are not discussing you or your brand on posts other than these.

If there is any such discussion going on, you need to know about it. Probably nothing else will give you more insights about your social media reputation other than these items.

Agorapulse monitors the buzz around all your social media profiles and brings in the relevant mentions to you. The listening feature varies slightly across the different platforms, but the intention is always to keep you informed.

It will detect all the mentions of your brand on Facebook and serve them in a tray similar to the one you got for the inbox. You will get the same options to filter comments and deal with them.

What makes it different from the inbox section is the way you put this information to use. You can use it to find a possible PR catastrophe and prevent it from doing any further damage.

If a social influencer is putting your brand in a positive light, then you can acknowledge them and establish good relationships with them.

This can help you increase organic traffic on your profile. You can make use of labels and tags to identify specific users who are more engaged, talking good about the brand or opposite, etc.

It will make it a lot easier for your team to manage various situation and comments.

Things work a little differently on Twitter and Instagram and hashtags rule this space. You can create your custom searches and look for specific hashtags which affect your brand.

You can add in the moderation rules to filter out the noise. Setting up new rules is precisely similar to how we did it in the inbox section.

The application also gives you an infographic to show you the distribution of all the monitoring data relevant to you.

Getting insights into the happenings on the internet is one thing and using it to your advantage is another. It depends on what policies and strategies you and your team employ to make the most out of this information.

The social media management feature is probably not the best one out there, but it is capable enough to be at the core of your marketing and advertising strategies.

Reports and growth

It does not matter if you are good with numbers or not. Numbers don’t lie, and therefore, we need them for reality checks.

Agorapulse provides all kinds of reports to the user for various profiles. You get the regular ones which are available on all the social media management tools and some others which feel exclusive.

There is audience growth, publication timeline, social engagement, community management, response time, and various other charts and infographics.

The platforms factors in all the labels and tags that you save and includes them in the reports. So, your organizational skills also affect the details of these reports and charts.

Reports also include comparison charts with you and the competing brands in it. This is a much convenient way to gauge all your metrics with the rivals.

However, there is one massive limitation on Agorapulse which adversely affects the user’s productivity and keeps this tool from becoming one of the favorites of businesses.

PowerPoint is the only method to export these reports. They haven’t included any other option to export the file.

The PowerPoint slides you end up getting are not among the best as well. Sometimes the text is not clear, other times it is the color and graphics.

Exporting reports from a social media management tool should not be such an annoying task. One expects to get concise and informative reports when exporting the data and Agorapulse clearly failed to take care of the exporting part.

We hope that they will take care of this shortcoming on the platform in future updates and include features such as emailing reports to the user on a weekly or a monthly basis.

Adding a common chart or infographic for all the social profiles linked to the account will be a good move as well.

Team management

There is a lot on the plate of business and brands with medium to a large following on social media. They need to take care of a lot of stuff, and often it requires more than one person to manage the social media side of things.

If you are using a tool to manage your social profiles, then it becomes necessary that the tool has got enough team management features. This section is all about such features.

Let us start with the invitation process. The number of members you can include in the team depends on your subscription plan.

You can invite other users or member using their email address. Agorapulse allows you to assign either the role of a manager or the role of a member to the new user.

A manager will get the admin rights across all the profiles. If it is a member, then you will get a few more options to choose the extent of access they get.

You can assign one of the following four roles to this new user on any of the profiles- admin, editor, moderator, and guest. Name of the roles themselves explain the extent of access. You can use any possible combination of profiles and roles for a new user.

Once the team is ready, it can use all the dynamic features of this application to manage the profiles.

One can assign specific posts and messages to a team member depending on their skill set and access level. The filters allow automatic assigning of items as well.

If one member is already interacting with some post, then the other will get a prompt about it. This is an excellent way to avoid any collision and maintain professionalism.

This section could’ve been made even better by including a chat option for the team members. It would’ve eliminated the need to other portals for interaction.

It allows one member to leave a note for the other while assigning a post or a comment. But it is not sufficient and the service provider better methods of interaction.

Customer support

One of the uses of Agorapulse is that it allows its users, which include businesses and enterprises, to provide excellent customer service to their customers. Most of the companies realize the importance of a competent customer support service.

It is a way to increase user loyalty and helps bring in more sales as well. This section is about customer support mechanism of Agorapulse.

We expected them to provide decent support services as the tool helps other organizations to improve theirs. Well, we were not disappointed at all.

They use most of the means possible to help a customer of a potential one. There is ample literature on how to use this application and interactive video tutorials to help users get out of a rut.

You can send them query tickets and get help within hours. The customer support representatives at Agorapulse seem helpful and knowledgeable and there nothing more than one can ask for.

Users may prefer different ways to get help or assistance. Presence of this many sources of information should take care of most of these preferences.

Agorapulse is popular for considering user suggestions when rolling out updates. A lot of their acknowledge and admire this characteristic, and so do we.

You can be sure that you will get some quality assistance if you encounter any roadblock while using the service.

Conclusion

There are a lot of reasons for you to get Agorapulse.

It has an efficient scheduling mechanism. The ability to repost content across profiles makes it one of the favorites of marketers and advertising executives.

The organized interface and simple options to interact with followers makes it easy and fun to interact on this platform. This social media manager is one of the best tools to interact with the audience from all the platforms.

Its listening feature is also a great help for businesses and helps them stay aware of all the buzz happening around their brand.

Agorapulse allows teams to be more efficient and organized with their features to delegate tasks and define roles.

The reports and charts are also a great aid and help one prepare better strategies for improvement.

However, everything is not great on this Platform, and there is still some room for improvement. The first step towards improvement can be to include more social platforms such as Pinterest.

They can also work on improving coordination between team members by providing a chat option. A visual calendar which shows post images for Instagram will make much more sense.

Some people find it difficult to identify posts on the calendar which leads to confusion and the need to click on every single one of them. It will also be helpful if Agorapulse allows more export options for charts and tables.

These drawbacks are not that glaring, but they will improve the efficiency of the tool for sure.

It is still a very capable social media monitoring tool. A tool which all the small and medium businesses should have. It is one of the best ways to manage all your social profiles from a single platform.