BrightLocal vs. Echobox Social

If you are a local business owner or marketing agency catering to local businesses, BrightLocal is a must have software. It has everything you need to track your local marketing efforts and to identify opportunities to make improvements, all at a very reasonable price point. You can also create nice looking reports to send to clients which are simple to create.

Incentivized

Echobox Social is well suited to publishers and media organisations who are publishing daily online content that needs sharing across social platforms. It works best if your social media objective is driving traffic to your articles/website. It would be suitable for both small and large organisations, as it allows multiple users with different access.

Incentivized

• When we use BrightLocal's citation building service, I know that we're getting quality citations done right. Their staff will email you with any questions and always double check the information before creating inaccurate citations.
• I love that BrightLocal is very quick about making changes when requested. For example, if we can't find a city on the drop-down list, you can chat them and they'll add it. Or if a report is pulling incorrectly, they'll re-run it within a reasonable timeframe.
• BrightLocal has a lot of different reports that are easy to send to your clients. You can even add them to a web-viewable dashboard so that your client can simply bookmark a link and view their reports when they please.

Incentivized

• Echobox automation is invaluable; the fact that it can intelligently automatically schedule articles within seconds of these being published on our website saves us a huge amount of time
• I find the AI message option particularly useful when rescheduling content. Although it does not always pick out the best quote, most of the time it does a good job and again saves a lot of time
• Having the option to schedule content immediately as well as in a specific time-slot or day is also very useful

Incentivized

• Up and down rankings were not always right on with the local search, but only off by one or two spots
• It felt like it was only used for local SEO, and I know there are more features, just never got to them.
• Didn't seem useful for every single client in the way Ahrefs or Spyfu did

Incentivized

• Since I'm Brazilian, and our whole team is based in Brazil, would be great if the whole platform was translated for Portuguese. There are no many English speakers in Brazil, to be honest. That would make it easier
• Tik Tok. Would be nice if somehow Echobox could provide their AI for Tik Tok Users

Because I am totally satisfied with Echobox service. I find it balanced between the service itself and its cost. Compared to its competitors, it is, without a doubt, the best product for small publishers. It only lacks in a greater and more efficient management of statistics which, at the moment, is absent. I will definitely renew Echobox!

Echobox Social's user interface is straightforward to navigate and even members of our team who are not necessarily social media specialists can step in when needed. The schedule queue is very easy to understand, meaning different team members can see what content is scheduled to be posted. When trying to edit the automation settings, each feature is well explained if you hover over the question mark button.

Although their customer support has always contacted me, they have not always been helpful. Many times I've had reports or information disappear with them telling me they had no record of it, even when I had reports that the information was in there. There are times when their system did have bugs and the support was able to help me there. Overall, the support staff is there but they cannot always do much and need to wait for their development team to get back to them which often takes a long time.

Incentivized

When there have been problems, they’ve usually been resolved very quickly. Some issues have occurred such as not being able to download images or posts not going out when the service has crashed, but they’re also very open to feedback. The option to download pictures loaded into the feed stories was my suggestion; saving us time creating new images and getting the posts out quickly

Incentivized

You just have to keep in mind that it can take a day or two to have the set up of an account all done.

Thryv reached out to me about 3 weeks before signing up with BrightLocal. While all of their features were impressive, there were only about 3 features that I would have used. Thryv wanted $200 per month for their service, which I found to be way overpriced for what I was wanting to use it for. I selected BrightLocal because it had the features I wanted at a lower price and then add ons. After using BrightLocal for a week and speaking with Becki, a customer service executive, I have discovered more features that I would use on BrightLocal than on Thryv.

Echobox AI function (the ability to decide when is the best time to share a post) is a [game-changer] and also the UI is cleaner and easier to use. I found Hootsuite confusing and complicated. It has too many windows and also doesn't pull the articles automatically. There is no comparison really, Echobox is miles ahead.

• BrightLocal's ranking reports have helped us better serve our clients' SEO needs, especially local SEO.
• Reporting is nicely accomplished with their online client report dashboards.
• Negative: some of their software defects are glaringly obvious take forever to fix, creating a number of awkward moments when we talk our clients through their reports.

Incentivized

• Higher click-through rates on articles shared to social.
• An increased volume of social posts across all pages through automation, leading to more eyes on more articles.
• Automation has led to more time for other tasks.
• Digital subscriptions have increased steadily since implementing Echobox.