Agorapulse vs. Spokal (discontinued)

Agorapulse has been a huge benefit to us as a business and is the most comprehensive platform we've used, having previously been with Hootsuite and ContentCal. It is likely to be better for companies that are managing multiple social profiles and want to consolidate these into one manageable platform. Given the amount of features it provides, it might not be suitable for individuals. The reporting is a fantastic part of the platform, which includes brand awareness for certain profiles, the best time to post for engagement, and details that all help with strategising. The inbuilt link shortening and tracking is useful, we've set this up and need to explore its capabilities further. Overall, we would recommend Agorapulse and it's a great asset to our business.

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For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.

• Calendar sharing - great for internal and external approval
• Community management - it means we can keep on top of engagement for all of our clients in one place
• Report - it's really useful for us to be able to create such in depth reports that we can use internally but also share with clients so they can see the results of what we are doing

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• Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
• Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
• Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
• twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
• Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
• Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies

• Would love to have a draft feature. We often don't schedule things until the assets are ready, or use a placeholder image and swap them afterwards
• Editing posts intended for multiple channels is not as easy as scheduling them in the first place. I would love to edit and have the same menu I do as when I'm scheduling where I have my base text and then the adjusted text for each social media. It's rare that something I've planned to be a similar post across channels, needs editing, but only for one of those channels. e.g. Correcting mistakes or changing strategies.
• Currently, I export the analytics and put it in a Google Sheet where I have more control over the data, which I love. For me to use the Agora Reports system, I would need substantial features like comparing metrics in the same charts, using direct line charts instead of smoothed (smoothed charts look nice, but just obfuscate data), separating out paid growth, etc. It's probably too large an ask for what Agora is trying to provide, which is why the export tool is very useful.
• While I'm talking about it, a slight bug with the export tool is that when you export two things in quick succession, it just sends a duplicate of the first report via email. I'll export a CSV of Global data and then a CSV of Content, and if I do it too quickly, it doubles up the Global data and I don't get the Content until I resend.
• More specific filtering for listening. Sometimes someone has our brand in their name and we get ALL of their content. We have to add each user like this to the filter instead of being able to filter out usernames that contain it.

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• I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.

The decision has been made. It's time to get to work--no steps back. I feel confident this product is well suited to help me make progress. I want to get down business and utilize the functionality of this product to meet my marketing goals. I feel very comfortable with the choice I have made.

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Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.

Any time I onboard a new team member, they are very quick to adapt to Agora's user interface and therefore require a very quick onboarding process from me, which is a massive plus. While I think having an all-in-one platform would be ideal, there is something to be said about only having a few bells and whistle so that my team can focus on what is most important to us and our clients, content

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Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.

Agorapulse occasionally has outages or shuts down. It never interferes with my use of the application or any of my posts

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Agorapulse has generally had great performance. Occasionally I have issues with my videos being posted on Instagram. I still am not sure why. the format of the videos is the same as the videos that are going through.

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The support from Agorapulse is excellent. Any time we have made contact they have been quick to reply, and given added extra information to help. The initial sales experience was also good. Not pushy like a lot of other companies, more that they would like to help. And they certainly did for us at a difficult time which built a fantastic relationship with us from the very start. Communication is great too, with just the right amount of emails and updates. Overall we feel that they genuinely care about their clients and users.

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They worked with Bluehost to make sure our blog connected properly. This was done without anyone from Strategic Revolution asking for this help.

I did not train in person

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The staff walked me through the whole platform and asked me if I had any questions. They were very helpful in answering any questions I had.

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Be sure of the game play mechanics you need to achieve your objectives, it will help significantly in setting up the game and creating the assets

Want to post the same content on different profiles? Don't duplicate your posts, you can just select what platform to post them onto! You can even change around the copy/hashtags/etc to optimize the posts for each platform.

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I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by scalability.

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• It has saved our company a lot of time digging through all different social medias to be responsive to consumers
• It has helped us be more responsive to prospects, so better lead generation
• Agorapulse allows us to be in touch quicker with our prospects, meaning better lead to appointment generation as well.

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• It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.