Shoutlet Review – Easy to use and increases efficiency
April 16, 2014

Shoutlet Review – Easy to use and increases efficiency

Kimberly Fletcher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction

Shoutlet is currently being used by two members of our E-Business team. Social media responsibilities fall to two people on that team, myself being one of them. It allows me to manage and measure our more than ten global social media presences from one location. With the Social CRM tool and the calendar alone, I'm able to do the work of a small social media team when it comes to scheduling content and engaging with customers. I'm also able to easily grab metrics on any or all of our social media presences.
  • Analytics – I'm able to pull any report on any (or all) of our social media presences with little effort. This makes it easy to analyze trends and keep an eye on the overall health of our social media activities.
  • Content Scheduling – Shoutlet's calendar feature has been of great value to us. Being able to draft and schedule content for all our Pages well in advance helps us save time and avoid having to comb our resources last minute to come up with content.
  • URL Shortener and QR Codes – I love the click metrics I get from Shoutlet on all shortened URL. Whether it was a URL shortened through posting content on our social Pages, or a URL shortened that was distributed elsewhere, I can easily get the click data I need. We don't use too many QR codes, but it's nice to able to manage them in the same place as well.
  • Contests – With limited resources, it's great to be able to build Facebook-friendly contests so easily. Without a dedicated designer on our team, we're still able to produce, distribute and easily manage contests. On top of that, the contests don't need to live on Facebook. We can put them on our blog of another landing page – definitely a value point for us.
  • Social Profiles – I'm not sure I'm utilizing this feature as best I could be. I'd like to be able to edit, tag, and manage our Social Profiles from the CRM dashboard. So, if I see something posted by an influencer, it would be nice to tag that person as well as the post as influential.
  • Instagram & Google+ – I'm happy that these two platforms are now integrated into Shoutlet, but I wish they could be as developed as the API's for Facebook and Twitter. I understand these are API restrictions and not necessarily Shoutlet restrictions, though.
  • Social Calendar – It would be helpful to be able to change the time or day of a scheduled post after you select 'post' rather than only being able to do that while it is draft form.
  • Increased efficiency – With such a small social media team, efficiency is key. Shoutlet has helped us manage not only the content for all of our presences, but also engage with our customers on all platforms.
  • Customer service – Though our customer service department is not actively using Shoutlet, the platform has helped us recognize and address issues that can easily be directed to customer service.
  • Engagement – Our engagement rate on all our social platforms has increased since using Shoutlet. I think it's because we're able to see all the conversations taking place and easily jump in to engage with our end-users. Additionally, we're now able to run contests and promotions which help boost engagement levels as well.
Prior to Shoutlet, we used Hootsuite Pro, and we still actually use it on occasion. Hootsuite has a great product but we found that Shoutlet offered a more robust, valuable product that helped us meet our needs better. We also explored Offerpop, but again, we found that Shoutlet had more to offer for the price. Other similar products like Radian6 were simply out of our price range. I mentioned that we're such a small team and just not ready to dive in with a full enterprise solution yet.
At this point, I don't see why we wouldn't renew with Shoutlet. Our social media presences are growing on a global level, so as long as Shoutlet can support the additional profiles at a competitive rate, then we'd likely keep working with them. I'm hoping to grow social media internally as well, so if the integration and training offered to our other departments goes smoothly, then we should continue to be happy customers!
I think Shoutlet is a great tool for small social media teams. We don't use this feature, but review and approval workflows would make it easy to manage small teams or multiple departments that use the tool. One of the reasons we selected Shoutlet is that it is very user-friendly. If you have limited resources, including limited design resources, Shoutlet makes it easy to put out professional designs and contests as well. During the selection process, you need to have a clear vision of what your social media goals are and look for a solution that helps you meet those goals. It turns out that Shoutlet's solution best aligned with our social media goals.