SocialPilot Review

Detailed Reviews

If you are spending too much time while managing social media, it is the high time that you start using social media managers. However, trusting a product without using it may lead to disappointments and regrets.

In this review, you will try to understand about the working efficiency and limitations of SocialPilot. That would surely help you to take a strong conclusion.

Pros

• Separate Options to Connect to Profile, Page, and Community: You can choose whether you wish to connect to the profile or another segment of that media platform. You can also connect both the options, and they will be treated as separate connections.
• Gentle Learning Curve: The application has a gentle learning curve which means it would not require much effort to go through all aspects of the application.
• Provision of adding RSS Feed: You can syndicate the content by entering the RSS feed URL. It will import the information about the posts of the websites whose RSS feed URL you have entered.
• Bulk Scheduling: You can create offline posts on the excel sheet according to the predefined format. Then you can save it as a .csv file and upload it to SocialPilot.
• URL Shortening: URL Shortening option decreases the length of the URL, helping to avoid decrement in the post’s appeal.

Cons

• Only Nine Social Media platforms: Although it allows you to connect to multiple profiles, there are only nine different platforms that it offers. Therefore, you can establish a connection with selected platforms only.
• Google Plus is missing: Google plus may not be the biggest social media platform, but it has a sufficient userbase that SocialPilot must include it.
• Analytics only available for four social media sites: You can conduct analytics only for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. No option to view insight into other social media platforms.
• No options to communicate: You can check the inbox to contact the users who have engaged with you on Facebook. But for other social media platforms, there was no option to engage with the audience.

Social media managers not only save a lot of time, but they also help to grow our reach. Many individuals use these social platforms to advertise their websites, products, and businesses.

Having a large following may make yourself a brand, and thus, social media platforms can be a huge source of advertising & marketing.

The profiles can also act as a status symbol for many companies. The current world works on the online connectivity making it important for everyone to keep their social accounts up to date.

SocialPilot has most of the features required to manage the posts. However, when it comes to managing the viewer engagements, you may face a tough time while using SocialPilot.

The India based company, SocialPilot Technologies Inc owns and maintains the product.

We have highlighted the benefits that the user will have over the other products along with the problems that he may face.

The conclusion is also supported by aspects such as user interface, analytics options, and team management features. Almost everything has covered, and you will find a complete balance between the negative and positive sides of the product.

User Interface and User Experience

UI plays a major role in attracting potential subscribers. Most of the people prefer the cloud product which delivers the features in an uncomplicated way.

SocialPilot has worked to maintain such a user interface by providing proper segmentation of the features.

However, while categorizing the features, the designers have made unnecessary overlapping of paths that lead to a feature.

The ‘post and content’ & feed options could be merged as one option. This may simplify the user interface further making it easy for users to reach them.

One has two different paths to reach the curated content which is unrequired and confusing.

Similarly, they have different access options for team members and clients which is also not essential. Under the team member section, there are only two different access levels.

Instead of making two separate options for adding team member and client, they could have created multiple access levels. The levels would decide whether the content is read-only or changeable.

The access should also be customized, i.e., there should be an option to provide access to any features.

Although there are some complexities present on the user interface, it hardly affects the learning. Once you start using the application, it would not take much time for you to get familiar with its working.

Adding and managing accounts

An efficient social media manager must support all of the prominent social media platforms. That will provide an opportunity for the user to connect and manage different social media accounts.

Why would one purchase a social media manager that offers limited platforms? Commun.it for example, is one such product which only offers three social media sites whereas SocialPilot has nine different social media platforms to which you can connect.

Although SocialPilot has a wide range of supported social networks, it may still not be able to fulfill the requirements of many users. Consider Social Report which has nearly forty supported networks. A user would prefer using Social Report when there is need of connecting to numerous sites.

However, if you want to connect to websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., which holds a large userbase, then SocialPilot may have advantages over other managers.

As you can see, the platform lets you know about the social networks to which you can connect. Now if you need to grow your profile on these websites, you can do it within seconds.

All you need to do is to click on the connect button and enter your profile passwords. In the case of Facebook, you can’t connect to this application if you do not own a page or a group.

For Instagram, as you can see in the image, they have exclusively mentioned Reminder for Instagram. Therefore, we can’t conclude that SocialPilot acts as a full-fledged manager for handling Instagram.

There a few major platforms missing such as Google+ which is required to be added urgently. This may reduce the interest of their potential users if the needed website is found absent.

After you connect to the website, you can go to the “Manage Accounts” window to perform actions regarding the connected profiles, pages, or community.

Sometimes it may happen that at the time of a significant issue, you would need to stop the scheduled activities. SocilalPilot has addressed this possibility of such a situation, and hence, has added a pause option.

It disconnects the manager to the profile which can be easily started again just by clicking on the same button.

From the same window, you can reset schedule, open analytics, and delete the connected profiles.

Creating Groups and adding team members for their management

When you need to manage social media profiles related to different clients, it becomes hectic if they are not separated.

Therefore, the manager must find a way to separate them. SocialPilot distinguishes accounts of a particular client by placing it in a particular group. However, that is required to be done manually.

You need to create a group where you need to select the multiple profiles and give a title for it.

The profiles selected under a group has separate menu options which appear when you open Manage Group option.

But the group is only designed to manage the posts. You can’t view the combined analysis for the profiles placed under a particular group.

Still, when you talk about managing posts, this section is highly useful. From here you can review the Queued posts, check the unscheduled posts, and analyze the errors.

The options are sufficient to provide dedicated content which holds the essential place when it comes to social media development.

However, when there are multiple clients, there is a need for a human resource who can manage dedicated projects.

For that, you have the provision of adding team members who will be able to handle the accounts. But here we identified a limitation that SocialPilot could fix easily.

Whenever you add a new team member, you have to assign him all the profiles separately. You can’t directly assign him a group. Direct access to the group would make the management easier.

Also, the team member doesn’t get customized access. You can either provide him the label of content scheduler or manager.

Content Scheduler needs to get approval for you, but the manager doesn’t. That is one of the big differences between these two labels. Also, the content scheduler has limited access.

Despite the presence of two options, the variety of access levels are not enough. You can’t choose to provide access to certain options only.

For Instance, if you wish to give access to the analytics, but not to the inbox, that is not possible while using SocialPilot.

They need to add an option where instead of access levels, one can choose what the features which the team member can visit are.

Content Management

There are two different tabs provided for content management purpose: Post and Content & Feed. In our opinion, these two tabs can be merged providing a simpler UI.

There are a few features that are overlapping here. The menu can be altered to place a single path to reach provided features instead of multiple ways.

If we talk about the content in general, it is the backbone of any social media profile. Good content promises faster growth as it decreases the effort required to attract the audience.

Faster growth of social media following also depends upon the quantity of the posts. When continuously feed is added to the social media profile, the total activity time remains high. That eventually increases the reach of the profile.

For updating the feed continuously, proper content management is required.

SocialPilot offers features for improving the quality as well as the quantity of the content. Along with this, they also offer ease to users by the management feature.

Let’s first scrutinize how SocialPilot manages the content. Management requires appropriate categorization of the content; SocialPilot has achieved that by placing content under five different sections.

These sections define the various stages of the post which is a notable methodology of dividing the content.

After you create a post, you can either save it as a draft or add it to queue.

The next step must be to set a time for the post. But what if we are not sure that when we should post it?

SocialPilot has given a thought to this possibility and added an unscheduled tab. The posts for which you do not specify the posting time goes under this tab.

After setting the posting time, it automatically moves to the queue. This reduces the manual work which you need to do for moving the content.

There is an error section which shows the posts which a social media website doesn’t allow the social media manager to post.

There can be instances when the content unknowingly violates the terms and conditions of a website. The SocialPilot can itself work to eliminate the posts which are not allowed for certain websites.

SocialPilot needs to provide the error while the person works on the post. It will save the time that would go wasted in creating, scheduling, and replacing the post.

When someone wishes to check the history of posts, he can visit the delivered page. But it only keeps the information till 85-90 days. After that, the posts are removed from the database.

As we have already mentioned, more the posts, more the reach.

Following this rule, social media managers have found various ways by which you can reduce the timing required to create multiple posts.

One such feature that we found on SocialPilot was Bulk Scheduling which lets the user create posts offline in a .csv file. You just need to import the file to provide them with the content, and the time & date when you want to post the content.

When it comes to the quality of the post, URL shortening matters a lot. Imagine a post with interesting text having a long URL in the end.

It not only looks ugly but also lowers down the appeal of the post. URL shortening, as the word implies, minimize the length of URL.

This necessary feature is available on SocialPilot, but you need to use it through Integrations. There are four, but it doesn’t matter much which you choose. In the end, what you will receive is the short form of existing URL.

The other way that SocialPilot offers to earn engagement is to share curated content and add RSS feeds. The curated content option provides you with the content related to the keyword added.

You can directly go through the list of results and find the relevant posts. The selected ones can be added to the queue. You can also choose on which social media platforms you want it to appear.

The RSS feed option has a similar working. However, here the website is selected by the user.

When you go to the “Add Feed” menu, you will find sections where you need to add information related to the feed.

After clicking the submit button, it will appear as feed content from where you can add it to queue.

SocialPilot provides a bridge between the posts you follow and the users who follow you.

In this way, relevant content can be found through the content curation and RSS feed. After that, using the scheduling features and content management section, you can keep track of required posts.

Limited options to track communication

It is important to track the posts, but when it comes to user engagement, you need to track their activity related to your profile.

When we visited the inbox section, it was showing options only for Facebook, and not for other connected profiles.

We have connected to LinkedIn, Twitter, and Tumblr, but none of them appeared in this section.

For Facebook, the menu options were the ‘comment’, ‘post’, ‘messages’, i.e., the people who comment on your post, the people who post on your page, and messages that you receive in your inbox.

In Twitter’s case, users can receive direct messages, there is a retweet option, and mention feature. Therefore, we can’t conclude that Twitter doesn’t require an inbox section.

Similarly, even LinkedIn and Tumblr can get a dedicated place in this inbox section.

Comparing it with Commun.it social media manager, which is known for Twitter handling. It has devoted a section just for tracking the followers. Similar sections are available for messages, mentions, etc.

SocialPilot must at least add one section for the complete account.

This limitation doesn’t let the users communicate directly with their followers. You can find the number of followers, mentions, etc., but can’t contact or take actions related to them.

That confines the growth of the profile. The features such as automated thanks message when someone follows or mentions you increases the credibility and inspires them to share more content of yours. At the same time, it saves time.

However, as the SocialPilot doesn’t have any such feature, you need to rely on external software if you wish to take benefit of such methods.

This is just an example, but the list of features that can be added would never end. Hence, the unavailability of basic inbox features should be removed soon.

We contacted the support team, and they provided us the information that currently they are working on bringing this feature to the application. Hope that the work will end soon, and their users will be able to use the feature for all the available platforms.

Still, we need to go through what is currently available on the software. As we have already mentioned that the inbox section is only available for Facebook, whatever we review further in the inbox section will be related to Facebook only.

There were three options which appeared on the screen when we opened the inbox section for Facebook: Messages, Comments, and Posts.

It is required to say that these activities can be easily tracked from the social media website itself. What appears here will appear on the messenger and on notification window.

As we know that the user needs to connect Facebook Pages and Facebook Group separately, the inbox must also be different for both of them.

But when you opened the inbox window, we realized that there is no option to track group activities. You can only find the information about the page. And as we mentioned above, there is no requirement of an additional application to track what SocialPilot Tracks.

Overall, a completely new inbox is required which must contain data about every single activity.

Analytics for connected profiles

If you are going to use SocialPilot for social networks other than Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, then you will not find the option to view the insight of your profile.

Amongst these networks, for Facebook, you can check the insight of the page but not for the group. Same for LinkedIn you can check the page, but not the profile.

The insight layout differs for every website. As it is time-consuming to check the layout for all the connections, we have selected Facebook and Twitter to make conclusions about the analytics.

As they provide special preference to Facebook, we choose to analyze its analytics first.

The main goal of this section is to provide both known and unknown information about the connected profiles in such a way that user won’t need much time to recognize all the activities related to its social media profile.

There were several occasions where we felt that most of the information provided is readily available on the Facebook application. Still, they need to implement them here as a part of complete understanding.

There are a few details which you can’t find on the Facebook page. Features such as audience demographics and gender can be considered as exclusive details.

You can also know which of your followers adore you the most. There are separate sections for the most active commenters, most active likers, and most active sharers of your posts.

However, there should be a complete list of followers for these sections in which the most active comes on top, followed by the second one, and so on. This will give us data about people who have high engagement with us and people who are inactive.

Jumping on to the Twitter insight, the general information was placed in an uncomplicated way. This can be used to know about the performance of your Twitter account, but as far as growth is concerned, this may not be effective.

It would be better if demographics option is included for Twitter also. Considering a complete view, they need to make a lot of attempts to make this section better.

However, they can first start with generating basic insight options for all the accessible websites. After that, they need to add sections which provide insight about the data which is not readily available to the user such as gender information, the average age of visitors, time spent on the page, etc.

That would be an actual benefit to the user which would let him know about his followers.

Final Verdict

SocialPilot’s power lies in its UI. In our opinion, the learning curve could not be any gentler. You can get used to the UI in no time.

However, they need to add and update a lot of things. From the initial stage of review, we kept on finding limitations after limitations.

There are only nine social networks that the platform supports, and hence, many prominent websites are missing. You can check the adding and managing account section to learn about the available websites.

Furthermore, the application doesn’t offer analytics for all the available websites. Hence, using the application for those websites is pointless.

Even the inbox feature is only available for Facebook, which is not an acceptable drawback.

If they wish to survive the tough competition, they need to work to defeat the long list of downsides. Currently, the application doesn’t seem to have a wide range of functions, and thus, recommending it would not be a possible job of us.

However, we would be glad to review the application again and change the conclusion after they add appropriate follower management options for a wide range of social media sites, and also provide analytics for those sites.