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Updated May, 2019
Tired of using 16 different tools to try to manage your social media activity?
Frustrated with the amount of time you’re spending without seeing real results?
You’re in luck! Today’s Agorapulse Review is going to open your eyes to some time-saving possibilities! I’m going to walk you through all of the features and capabilities of Agorapulse, including which networks and network functions are supported. We’ll also cover how much Agorapulse costs, who should use it, and perhaps most importantly, my own experiences, unique benefits observed, and the limitations that I’ve found.
Since not everyone has the same needs and questions, I divide my social media marketing tool reviews into the same logical sections and link to them here so you can skip to what interests you if you wish:
- My Personal Experience With Agorapulse
- Who Is Agorapulse For?
- Background & History of Agorapulse
- Supported Networks & Capabilities
- Pricing & True Cost
- Unique Benefits
- Limitations
- Feature Checklist
- Conclusions & Recommendations
My Personal Experience With Agorapulse
Before we get into the meat of this review, I think it’s important to let you know what my experience has been with Agorapulse. Did I just sign up for a free account yesterday? Or have I been using this tool to manage my social profiles for years?
In March of 2016, I was attending Social Media Marketing World in San Diego, CA. During a lunch break with my dear friend Peg Fitzpatrick, we were looking for a table and she saw her friend Emeric sitting by himself at the “International” table, so we joined him. Peg introduced me and then explained to me that Emeric ran a great social media management tool called Agorapulse.
Over the course of the next 45 minutes, Emeric and I got to know each other and he was kind enough to demo his tool for me on his phone. Needless to say, I was impressed, both with the tool and with this charming and approachable CEO.
Immediately after the conference Emeric provided me with a complimentary account “with no expectations.” He just wanted me to use the tool but, after trying it out, I couldn’t help but to incorporate it into my daily workflow, and of course write about it, many times in fact:
Since that initial meeting, I’ve had numerous emails, Skype calls and follow-up meetings with Emeric, have been an affiliate, an ambassador, and am now the Brand Evangelist for Agorapulse – which means I am now responsible for all of our ambassador and brand relationships.
As my go-to tool for social media management – in fact, Agorapulse is the one tool that I use each and every day – my experience with Agorapulse is immense. However, I continue to test and evaluate other social media marketing tools, which gives me the knowledge to be able to review & recommend the best possible tool for each unique business situation.
In each of these reviews I will be going over things like network compatibility, specific features and capabilities that are unique to a tool, and any limitations I spotted. These will help you decide if a tool is right for you, and having all of these facts in my head is what allows me to instantly compare tools and offer recommendations based on business requirements.
Who Is Agorapulse For?
This is always a more complicated question to answer than it seems.
On the one hand, the Agorapulse pricing plans, which you’ll see below, easily indicate different sizes of businesses that are best suited for each level (Solopreneur, Small Businesses, Agencies, Large Organizations).
On the other hand, usage requirements must be considered.
For instance, if your sole social profile is a Facebook Page, you likely have little need for a social media management tool of any kind. If, however, you want to be able to schedule posts and monitor activity on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Agorapulse is uniquely suited for you.
So Agorapulse is for any blogger or business who is active on multiple social networks (full compatibility list below), and is looking for comprehensive scheduling, monitoring and reporting for those networks.
If you haven’t already, now is a good time to make note of your known requirements. How many team members need access to Agorapulse? How many profiles do you need to connect? What specific features or capabilities, that you’re aware of, are required and which are “nice to have?” Keep that list handy as we walk through the rest of this Agorapulse review.
Background & History of Agorapulse
Agorapulse was first released in 2014. Founded by Emeric Ernoult along with Benoit Hédiard, the successful French company has deftly carved out a niche for itself, particularly among social media experts and agencies.
Over the years, as Agorapulse has transitioned from a focus on Facebook management to more of a complete social presence tool, the features and pricing have adjusted accordingly.
The name, Agora, is Greek for a place where people meet, such as a marketplace or square. And Pulse refers to vibrations of energy. So Agorapulse is where your social energies and vibrations meet and come together.
In time, Agorapulse added support for Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram. In 2017, Agorapulse completely rebuilt their tool from the ground up, adding improvements to the functionality and user interface across the board, as well as paving the way for future enhancements.
Agorapulse is supported by a global team, and maintains an active feedback system giving users easy access to suggest features and comment on upcoming releases. And in recent years Agorapulse has been considered the top rated social media management tool.
Supported Networks & Capabilities
Agorapulse currently supports the following social networks and profiles. (As capabilities are added, this review will be updated.)
☐ Personal Profile
☑ Business Page
☑ Group
☐ Event
☑ Advertising
☑ Multiple Profiles
☑ Personal Profile
☑ Company Page
☐ Group
☐ Multiple Profiles
☐ Board
☐ Board Section
☑ Multiple Profiles
☑ Direct Publishing/Scheduling
☑ Story Publishing/Scheduling
☑ Video Publishing/Scheduling
☑ Advertising
YOUTUBE
☑ Multiple Channels
Pricing & True Cost – “How Much Does Agorapulse Cost?”
Agorapulse currently starts at $79/month for “small businesses” and has plans for agencies and enterprise. Here’s the plan breakdown:
Note that there’s a significant discount when choosing to pay annually.
To calculate your “true cost” to use Agorapulse, consider how many team members you have and how many profiles you want to incorporate. Then look at the available plans and determine if an existing plan will suit you or if you need to add users or profiles.
For instance, imagine if you had a small business with you and someone else managing social, and had 2 Facebook Pages, 2 Twitter profiles, 2 YouTube channels, 1 LinkedIn profile and 1 Company Page, and 2 Instagram profiles. That means you need 2 Team Members and 10 Social Profiles. You could choose the Pro plan for $79/month and add Power Reports for $29 a month, giving you a total cost of just $108/month, paid annually.
Once you know your total monthly (or annual) cost, then consider the savings you will experience through convenience and time saved, as well as the potential of business growth through enhanced social media marketing.
For example, a business that normally spends a lot of time on Facebook and Twitter will generate dozens, perhaps hundreds, of comments, replies and mentions on those platforms. Monitoring and responding to that activity and a growing audience takes time. Time that Agorapulse expertly saves by streamlining that activity into easily-reviewed Inboxes, even including comments on ads that you’re running.
Estimate the time that you can save each month, multiply by your hourly rate, then subtract from the Agorapulse total cost you calculated earlier. That’s your true cost!
A free trial is available here. (and 2 free months!)
Unique Benefits
First and foremost, Agorapulse offers a comprehensive combination of social network support that’s not seen in most tools. If you have profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube, there aren’t too many alternatives.
Second, Agorapulse has assembled one of the best scheduling tools, and it continues to improve with each iteration. You can schedule posts to be shared at a specific date and time, of course, but you can also choose to repeat them a number of times, an unlimited number of times, add them to a queue, and see all in calendar or list format.
Third, and perhaps most important, is Agorapulse’s Social Inbox. Whether on desktop or the mobile app, Agorapulse merges all of your comments, mentions and messages for a particular platform into one easy-to-use stream of activity. And not only can you quickly review, assign or respond to comments, you can also allow Agorapulse to automatically review and ‘hide’ activity. This is particularly useful for Twitter Direct Messages as you can easily filter out and never see all of the common Auto DM spam.
Limitations
The one obvious limitation of Agorapulse, like most social media management tools, is missing capability for certain social profiles / networks. If you don’t need to schedule activity for, say, Pinterest, then this is not a big deal.
The second limitation I’ve encountered is a lack of analytics for LinkedIn or Google+ (LinkedIn Reports were added 8/2018, Google+ was deprecated 2019). Again, this may not apply to you if you’re not focused on those networks. But if they’re important to you, alongside the other networks supported, the lack of built-in analytics means you will need to refer to the network’s native reporting or other tools.
The third limitation I felt worth mentioning is that Bulk Scheduling is not supported. If you have a lot of content in your website or blog archive that you’d like to schedule out, it can be very convenient to be able to upload a CSV file of links and other information, scheduling sometimes hundreds of updates at once. Unfortunately, such activity must be scheduled and reviewed one post at a time within Agorapulse. (Bulk Upload & Scheduling is now available for all profiles.)
Feature Checklist
Since not every social media management tool has the same purpose, focus or capabilities, it’s good to get an overview of what a tool is able to do.
You’ll be able to tell by the checkmark whether a standard feature is there or not. If a particular feature of interest isn’t listed or explained sufficiently, do feel free to ask in the comments below.
☑ The feature, or version of the feature, is available.
☐ The feature is not available.
PUBLISHING
☑ Post to Multiple Social Networks Simultaneously
☑ Customize Post per Network/Profile
☑ Schedule Posts
☑ Schedule Posts per Network/Profile
☑ Queue Posts
☑ Queue Posts per Network/Profile
☑ Add to End or Beginning of Queue
☑ Multiple Queues / Campaigns per Network/Profile
☑ Shuffle Queue
☑ Repeat Post X Times
☑ Repeat Post until XX/XX/XX Date
☑ Repeat Post Unlimited Times
☑ Post Preview
☑ Multiple Image Post
☑ Profile Lookup on @mention
☑ Facebook Audience Targeting
☑ Facebook Album Support
☑ Custom Shortlink / bit.ly Integration
☑ Browser Extension / Integration
☑ Bulk Upload / Scheduling
☑ RSS Feed Monitoring / Publishing
☑ Message Templates (Saved Replies)
☑ UTM Parameter Integration
☑ Content Tagging & Reporting
MONITORING
☑ Twitter Inbox (replies, mentions, direct messages)
☑ Twitter Search (keyword, URL)
☑ Advanced Twitter Search (geofencing, filtering, etc.)
☑ Facebook Inbox (comments, mentions, messages)
☑ Facebook Contests & Promotions
☑ Facebook Reviews
☑ LinkedIn Inbox (comments, messages)
☑ Instagram Inbox (comments, mentions, messages)
☐ Pinterest Inbox (comments, mentions, messages)
☑ YouTube Inbox (comments, mentions)
☑ Spam / Custom Filter
☑ Translation Integration
REPORTING
☑ Twitter Analytics
☑ Facebook Analytics
☑ Facebook Competitor Analytics
☑ LinkedIn Analytics
☑ Instagram Analytics
☐ Pinterest Analytics
☐ YouTube Analytics
☑ Customizable Reports
☑ Exportable Powerpoint/PDF Reports
RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
☑ Twitter User Profile & Follow/Following
☑ Instagram User Profile & Follow/Following
☑ Engagement / Activity History
☑ Notes, Tagging, etc.
ASSET MANAGEMENT
☑ Mobile App
☐ Stock Image Search
☐ Image Creation / Editing
☐ Digital Asset Management / Storage
TEAM / AGENCY FUNCTIONALITY
☑ Team Member Accounts / Permissions
☑ Team Structure / Organization
☑ Team Chat / Notes
☑ Post / Comment Assignment & Review
Conclusions & Recommendations
Agorapulse is one of the true “complete” social media management tools. When you review all of its features and network capabilities, you can see that it’s designed to be the core component of any successful social media presence.
Aside from a few limitations which may or may not impact you, the list of Agorapulse features and benefits is impressive.
What’s more, I’ve found the Agorapulse interface to be distinct, contemporary, and easy to use. The calendar presentation of queued & scheduled posts is intuitive, and the post creation workflow is dynamic.
For instance, regardless of which networks you want to post to, what you want to post, or when you want it to go out, you always begin by clicking on the ever-present orange Publish button (or your browser extension button). From there you may select different networks, upload an image or video, preview what the post will look like and edit it per profile, and decide whether you want to share it now or later.
You can change from a link share to a media share at will, and note that any shared links are automatically converted into a short link (and even a branded short link, if you’ve set up and connected a bit.ly account).
When you click on each of the network preview icons, you can see how your share will look on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter (if you’ve selected appropriate profiles in the left sidebar). You can then edit those shares so that each of your posts can utilize that network’s best practices (i.e. 2 – 3 hashtags within tweets).
Other tools offer great publishing workflows as well (and I’ll be reviewing them all over time with the tag Social Media Tool Review), but few offer the outstanding combination of publishing, scheduling, reporting and more that Agorapulse does.
Before I conclude this review, some of you may be wondering why the author of “The Unofficial Book on Hootsuite” is so adamantly recommending an alternative social media management tool. And you’d be right to ask.
The short answer is, I published that book in 2015 and have since found a tool that’s superior. But the truth is, superiority in social media management tools is mostly one of perception.
You see, what I’ve been trying to communicate throughout this review is that Agorapulse is great, packed with features, but what matters most are the features and capabilities that you need for your business. If Pinterest is your most important network, this isn’t the ideal tool for you. If you’re active in multiple Twitter Chats and need a tool that will help you manage them, this isn’t the tool for you.
When Emeric first took the time to introduce me to Agorapulse, I liked how it looked and saw some initial benefits to me. As I became familiar with the tool and used Agorapulse more and more, those benefits, and others, became even more obvious and integral to my business.
Therefore, I found that Agorapulse was the best possible social media management tool for me.
Will it be so for you too? That remains to be seen. If you’ve been intrigued by what I’ve shared, and think that the list of features and benefits will work for you, then I would strongly advise giving Agorapulse a try using the free trial link below, and as one of my readers, you’re entitled to your first to months free!
The above review is comprised of my own thoughts, opinions and observations. My account was provided for free for evaluation purposes, and the links are affiliate links. While there’s no additional cost to you, any commission I may earn on sales helps me to continue taking the time to review tools like this for you. More importantly, to be frank, when you choose to sign up for an account using one of the above links, we’re able to measure that activity, and that helps me gauge the effectiveness and helpfulness of my content.
Want to save time with your social media activity and yet get even more results? Use the #1 rated social media management tool, Agorapulse, and as a friend of Mike Allton, you’re eligible to receive your first two months free after trial! Go to https://www.Agorapulse.com/Allton to learn more and get started.
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