Is SocialPilot worth buying?
Find all the answers in this detailed review of SocialPilot.
Do you want to promote your content to all social networks in one click? Let’s take a look at one of the popular content promotion tools.
Posting your blog's latest content on social networks is a great way to attract more readers. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are great tools for blog promotion , especially if you have a lot of friends or followers. It allows your content to be shared within and outside your network, giving your blog the exposure and traffic you want.
Posting regularly on these networks can be a tedious and time-consuming task, and you may not always have the time to do it every day. You may find that logging into a social network and posting every hour is not the best use of your time at all.
This is where auto-posting apps like SocialPilot can help you. SocialPilot lets you set up your social network accounts and allows you to schedule posts in advance. Currently, it lets you connect to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. SocialPilot is a web app and Chrome extension that can be accessed through any browser. You can connect five social media profiles with its free plan or connect more by upgrading to a professional account.
Here's how this tool can easily automate your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn posts.
How do I use the SocialPilot dashboard?
Once you sign up (either for a paid plan or for a 14-day trial), SocialPilot will open your dashboard and ask you to connect your social profiles.
As you can see from the screenshot above, you can connect to all major social networks. If you run multiple accounts on one platform, you can connect them separately, which is especially useful for agents.
Related to this is the ability to create groups. You can group social accounts to your liking and perform actions on the entire group. This is especially useful for agencies that need to create groups for each client, thereby keeping each client's social accounts separate.
Unfortunately, your dashboard's main screen isn't very user-friendly. It has four boxes at the top (Posted Today, Queued Today, Unscheduled, and Errors) with the current number of posts in each category. Clicking one of the boxes will take you to the relevant page.
Below that, SocialPilot lists each of your linked social accounts and indicates how many posts you currently have queued, as well as any errors.
Having all of your social accounts listed separately seems to take up a lot of screen space. I personally prefer to have my calendar and inbox on the homepage. SocialPilot still offers a calendar to display your scheduled posts, it just isn’t on the homepage.
When you first log in, the platform walks you through the initial setup, showing you how to connect your accounts and how to create a publishing schedule. The rest of the platform is also easy to understand, just click through the various modules on the navigation bar. There is always an icon on the page you are using to access help.
Create content
Now let’s get to the point. A good interface is great, but it’s ultimately meaningless without great software to support it. Ultimately, the question we ask when evaluating a platform like this is: does it make the social media practitioner’s job easier? The answer is: yes .
Account management becomes clean and efficient thanks to the aforementioned ability to organize each account into relevant groups (by channel, by client, etc.). If you're posting the same content on multiple channels, it's easy to select them all during the process. If you've already grouped them, it's even easier - just select the appropriate group and the post will be published where you want it. Social Pilot also makes it quick to schedule, queue, edit and share all your content. There's even content management included in the publishing module - just enter a keyword and once you find the right content, you can publish, queue or schedule it immediately.
In addition to being able to create posts and share curated content, you can also connect your favorite RSS feeds and send content from there.
Last time we reviewed SocialPilot, there was no way to post content directly to Instagram. Now they have fixed this issue and you can easily create a post, Story or Reel. The one limitation I see at the moment is related to TikTok. You can only post to TikTok indirectly through the SocialPilot mobile app, and you have to click "Share" at the right time to share your post on TikTok.
SocialPilot's bulk post scheduling tool makes it easy to create up to 500 posts at once. Simply upload a formatted CSV spreadsheet (one post per row), then view the posts and schedule them to be published on your social networks.
Content Library
Once you’ve been posting on your social accounts for a while, you’ll start to notice patterns in how you post, posts that are the same or very similar to content you’ve used in the past. Also, once you’ve been running a blog for a while, you can start to highlight some “evergreen content” — the best posts and pages that have lasted for a long time. You’ll want to share social links to these evergreen pieces of content over and over again.
SocialPilot has developed a built-in content library where you can save content snippets for later use and reuse. All team members can use this library to create and store digital assets that need to be regularly added to social media posts.
You can add any posts or hashtags that you might reuse to your content library. If you build a decent-sized library, you can use filters and keywords to search for the content you want.
Facebook Advertising
In 2022, SocialPilot added a new feature that allows you to promote your Facebook posts directly from the SocialPilot dashboard. You can promote a post that has already been published, or schedule a promotion when you create a post. The tool automatically sets the ad content as a "Sponsored Post" and provides the same promotion methods as Facebook promotions. You can also create ads from the SocialPilot dashboard and choose the business goal, duration, budget, placement, and audience for each ad.
Inbox
One of the best features of the platform is the social inbox, which lets you manage and respond to comments and messages across all your accounts and pages. For agencies that handle the heavy lifting of handling clients, the ability to stay on top of all communications is worth the monthly fee alone.
Inbox works across your Facebook Page, Instagram Business account, LinkedIn Page, and Google Business account. My only minor complaint is that it would be nice to see your incoming tweets here.
You can use the Inbox to respond to comments and messages on your Facebook page and Instagram business profile, to respond to posts on your Facebook page, to respond to comments on posts on your LinkedIn page, and to respond to questions on your Google Business Profile.
analyze
The Analytics module works with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and your Google Business Profile to provide deeper insights into your post performance beyond the standard follower, reach, and engagement metrics. You’ll be able to get a bird’s eye view of which strategies are working, then dig deeper into why and how. You can find out who and where your most engaged audiences are, and which hashtags are resonating most. You’ll learn the demographics of your audience and the times and days they’re most active. If you’re having trouble building a successful social media presence with these analytics, you can’t blame Social Pilot.
This is especially important if you primarily use Facebook for your social media marketing. While Social Pilot offers a variety of features for many different channels, it does it all when it comes to Facebook. You can see a ton of stats and charts related to your Page and Posts. While Instagram analytics aren’t as in-depth as its big brother, the analytics offered by Social Pilot have improved significantly the last time we checked. You can find stats related to your profile, posts, stories, and Reels, and even analyze the performance of the hashtags you use.
integrated
Perhaps because of SocialPilot's relative obscurity, it doesn't have a lot in the way of third-party integrations or apps. This hurts the platform's chances of working with larger companies that may have a larger tech ecosystem than just social media-related. Apps that connect project management, e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), and many other parts of the marketing world to social media marketing (SMM) platforms are plentiful—over 150 apps work with Hootsuite. This shouldn't bother Social Pilot's smaller customers (Pro and Small Team plans), where these app integrations aren't necessary to build a successful social media presence, but some larger customers may want to do their research to make sure they can (or will be able to) connect to other software solutions.
However, for now, SocialPilot offers a workaround that supports integration with Zapier , a third-party web service that handles integrations with other web apps. If you connect your SocialPilot account to your Zapier account, you can connect any of over 1,000 apps to SocialPilot and share data between them to streamline your workflow. Of course, this isn't free, so you'll need to pay a monthly fee to the other company. But the good thing is that it's still cheaper to use Social Pilot than Hootsuite.
Other notable integrations include:
- Project Manager does just what its name implies.
- URL shortening services like Google+ , Bitly , Sniply , Rebrandly , and Feedly . Really! You can connect SocialPilot to your accounts on any or all of these services and set it as the default for any or all of your accounts so that when you create a post, long links are automatically shortened.
- Canva , which you can use to create professional designs and then share to your social accounts without leaving SocialPilot.
- Web browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that lets you save and schedule any page you're browsing. It's also really handy when you're caught slacking off at work - click the extension button and bam! You're working.
How is SocialPilot different from other social media tools?
SocialPilot isn’t the only publishing service out there. In fact, there are plenty of others that have been around longer than it.
Buffer and Hootsuite are other popular apps for this purpose.
So what makes SocialPilot different and even better?
All three services offer premium plans, but SocialPilot's $10 per month price pales in comparison to Buffer's $15 per month and Hootsuite's $17.49 per month.
SocialPilot Pricing
As someone who has used Buffer and Hootsuite, I must say that SocialPilot’s focus on just three social networks, its low monthly fee and user-friendly dashboard drew me in. SocialPilot also offers Android and iOS apps , which is helpful.
If you want to build a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Xing with minimal effort, SocialPilot is a great tool to start with. It's easy to set up and use, and allows you to focus on the three main social networks that really matter to blog owners and online entrepreneurs.
Conclusion : SocialPilot Review
If you're new to social networking, there's one thing you should know: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the three main networks for businesses and bloggers. This is where most interactions happen, and where your content is more likely to get noticed.
You don't have to be on every platform — just the ones that give you the best exposure. So in that regard, SocialPilot is not just a great tool — it's a must-have.
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