How Agorapulse Won the Heart of Romance Review Blog GraveTells

Sue Brown-Moore knows what makes an encapsulating, steamy romance story. She’s dominated the romance publishing space on social media, as both an influencer and tastemaker, since 2010 with her review and promotion blog, GraveTells Romance.

Sue Brown-Moore of GraveTells Romance

Award-winning blog GraveTells brings diverse and creative romance book recommendations across a host of social platforms. Capturing the attention of an audience that spans the breadth of the romance publishing industry, from at-home readers to aspiring authors, to notable publishers and publicists.

When Sue isn’t reviewing romance novels, she works as a freelance editor, helping publishers and indie authors fine-tune in-progress romance manuscripts and sharing helpful tips and advice on writing.

We asked Sue why she chose Agorapulse to help her spread the love of romance.

Social Outreach That Won’t Kill the Mood

During GraveTells’ formative years, Sue used a free entry-level Hootsuite account, as things were just starting to heat up. This was straightforward enough and served her purpose for the first couple of years in her blogging career.

However, as anyone who works with social media outreach knows, as the volume of content grows the time demands can soon grow as unwieldy, as untamed, as the heart of a young and feisty heiress in a room full of rugged bodyguards.

As GraveTells started to make waves in the romance world, Sue was spending up to 40 minutes per blog post formatting her social posts.

Sue explained the issues she was having with other tools,

“I found the [Hootsuite] interface to be messy, clunky, and restrictive. As I started spending more time pre-planning my social media outreach around blog posts and personal activities, I decided to invest in paid tools and did a solid round of in-depth product trials. I needed a service that would allow me to easily and quickly schedule posts across the social platforms I use most often—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.”

Sue decided the top qualities of a social tool that would win over her heart were:

Overall ease of use

Good reporting features

Dependability

A clean, user-friendly interface

Sue took her time, carefully evaluating the different tools. Several made the list, including Sprout Social and CoSchedule, but only one would go on to conquer her affections.

Eventually answering that call was Agorapulse.

Every Love Story Needs a Hero

Sue had come across Agorapulse while working as part of the Barclay Publicity publicity team, so when she started trials to choose the tool for her personal brand and GraveTells, Agorapulse was a natural choice.

But the course of true love never did run smooth. After her trials, Sue initially went with Social Sprout to manage her paid social, due to some concerns she had with the features available for her particular purposes. She published a blog detailing her evaluation of the tools and the reasons for her decision.

“After seeing my article on Essential Tools for Bloggers, an Agorapulse representative reached out to me and offered a free trial, with access to some beta features that addressed concerns I had.”

Sue’s familiarity with Agorapulse’s clean interface and robust reporting made it an attractive option. But what really raised it up to hero status was its ability to schedule multiple events at one time and tag users across social networks.

“The app lets me tag users on the appropriate platforms. This is essential for outreach. It clearly shows me a preview of what content I’m posting on which service, with the ability to edit right in the window.” Sue explained.

Add custom tags (seen in blue) to categorize your fans, followers, and detractors.

With a scheduling calendar optimized for GraveTells, Agorapulse allowed Sue to set post dates and times at a glance. The reporting tools reveal GraveTells’s most effective activity times per network, as well as which posts are the most effective during those times.

Agorapulse improves your content strategy by identifying the best times to publish.

Continuing on with Agorapulse for many months after, Sue found that the tool was also perfect for scheduling her blog reviews at the frequency which worked for her audience. She reported back to us that it had an incredibly easy to use and clean interface and was all-around lovely experience to use.

“My scheduling cadence is based around memory retention techniques– I reach out with similar content to the same users after 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, then 14 days. Agorapulse makes this super easy to set up, AND I can even schedule this spread of posts across multiple social media platforms all at the same time.”

Set a republishing frequency to make sure your content gets the exposure it deserves.

“That’s powerful, and it saves me serious prep time.”

Before Agorapulse, Sue was spending 30-45 minutes per blog post on scheduling social media. Now she can do it in less than 10, and often as quickly as 2-3 minutes.

Swoon.

Agorapulse Makes a Community’s Heart Grow Fonder

GraveTells and Agorapulse are proving to be a match made in heaven.

Across the two Twitter accounts that Sue manages, she’s seen her personal handle grow by 12% since starting with Agorapulse. She credits this to features like multiple post scheduling, combined with organic exposure growth.

The main Twitter handle, @GraveTells, has also had a transformative change since bunking up with Agorapulse.

“My main account has experienced a 70% increase in number of tweets published. Which is a positive stat, since I publish on an organic decay schedule—mentioned previously with the 1 days, 3, days, etc cadence—and I don’t spam followers, a 105% increase in tweet engagement, and a 155% increase in tweet replies.

Being able to post regularly, at set times when I know my followers are most likely to engage is likely what has encouraged this healthy stat growth. I know all that because of Agorapulse’s nifty reports.”

She added, “This little tool does nearly everything I need, and it does it with no fuss.”

And isn’t that all we want in a healthy romance?