BrightLocal vs. SOCi

I recently broke away from corporation gyms and decided to start my own personal training business in Plano, TX. Looking to expand my visibility in order to bring in new clients, I signed up for BrightLocal after taking a Udemy class on optimizing my Google Business Page. I have not even had BrightLocal for a week and I have already seen a tripling increase in views on my Google Business Page and an increase in the number of people who have reached out to me. I signed up for the citation builder campaign and the campaign isn't even finished. BrightLocal also set me up with a customer service executive named Becki who was absolutely lovely! She gave me lots of things to think about and action steps to take to further expand the reach of my business. I haven't even been with BrightLocal for a month and I'm already so grateful for them! I highly recommend them and their services to help you grow your business!

In my opinion, I think that Brandify is a great software for managing large databases and allowing multiple users to access and edit data at the same time. For medium to large companies that have a strong emphasis on viewing and replying to all their customer reviews. Brandify can save a considerable amount of time and energy by getting everything together in one place.

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

• Firstly, as a user of Brandify, I am really fond of their after-sales support services because as a user these services matter a lot.
• Brandify has made the work so much easier as it avoids spending time looking for better options.
• It is very helpful platform for the growth of a company.
• Its analysis helps us in foreseeing situations that can be either good or bad and ensure that we think of a possible solution.

Incentivized

• BrightLocal can very difficult to communicate with, especially when it comes to reporting bugs / defects, and also when it comes to finding out whether they are working on those bugs.
• BrightLocal's reports, other then the ranking reports, have far too many bugs and they seem to either have little QA or poor QA practices, considering how many defects there are.

Incentivized

• Some things can be hard to find at first glance in the dashboard
• Lacks the ability to pull organic social stats from content that is natively posted
• Facebook ads lack some of the advanced features that Facebook offers

Incentivized

There are some aspects of the scheduling of posts that could be more user friendly for the less tech-savvy users.

Incentivized

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

We have not had to contact support so there is nothing to say in response to this question. We are sure that if we needed to contact them we would be able to get any issues resolved quickly

Incentivized

We used to use RavenTools but left several years ago as we needed a software platform more geared towards Local SEO, which is exactly what BrightLocal specializes in. Both of these have multiple features and great reporting options, but in the end, BrightLocal offered more features for Local SEO and also offered better reporting for clients as the reports were very easy to read and understand.

Incentivized

I used the basic Hootsuite subscription to schedule organic social media posts. However, it fell short in assisting franchises or businesses with multiple locations because it lacks the ability to localize content. So, you would essentially have to create 50 posts for 50 business locations if you wanted to include a unique phone number. SOCi lets you do that with one post. It also lacked a rolled up reporting feature. SOCi can show me what's going on at a high level as well as at the location level or group level.

Incentivized

• Positive because it makes our local clients happy and want to renew with us.
• Positive for the price. I didn't manage the budget, but we were always happy to have the service so I know we were getting value from it.
• Positive to see local rankings up

Incentivized

• We're still new to the platform and determining this information.
• We know that some time is saved by the information being gathered together in one place, but we've also spent a lot of time discussing concerns/questions with their care team and getting fully set up.

Incentivized