eClincher vs. Engagor (discontinued)

Best suited for a marketer that cares about reports, needs a social media management platform and doesn't want to pay more for a more aesthetically pleasing version of a platform with the same or less functionality, such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social. For a social media marketer that wants to automate some of their postings, the queues feature is great for this functionality. Not best suited for beginners to social media, as their platform is best utilized with someone familiar with the industry that knows what they are doing. Their chat support team is very good though, but this type of individual might find themselves spending a lot of time on the platform.

Incentivized

Engagor is a very powerful tool for customer care purposes to be able to engage in real-time with your customers. If there are a lot of messages coming in during important peaks throughout, we can easily answer them every 30 seconds.
Engagor isn’t that fit to use for publishing. We mostly use Engagor to reply to messages in real-time. However, for scheduling posts in Engagor, we publish and schedule on the native platform instead.

• eClincher supports nearly every social network and connects to a large number of sources (blogs, bit.ly, Google Analytics, Google My Business). This makes workflow tremendously easy.
• Posting Groups. At higher levels of service, eClincher allows you to set-up individual brand accounts. My agency isn't at that level, so we utilize eClincher's posting groups to make 1-click groups that post to all of the profiles for each client. This allows us to quickly post a cohesive message across all channels.
• Workflow management: eClincher adds plenty of additional tools to make your workflow fast. Connections to free stock photo services make it easy to add generic pictures to your content. Google Analytics and bit.ly can keep track of statistics and measure success. The Inbox allows you to handle all your clients' accounts from one screen (including comments, messages, reviews, and more). The Feeds and Influencers tabs allow you to understand your market and what's being said. Altogether, eClincher makes a 1-app solution for Social Media Management.

Incentivized

• Real-time mention tracking is a must these days. Quick responsiveness is critical on many social media platforms, especially on Twitter.
• Fast and helpful support via Engagor chat and messages helps a LOT! I think the longest wait time was about 40 seconds for me. My workflow never gets disrupted because of idle sessions.
• Automations can help you a lot. Automated "recipes" are great tools for decreasing your agents' workload, and there are many customizable settings for them.

• It's not very visually appealing, but this is not a dealbreaker.
• The reporting features could definitely use some work. I still get more value from the native SNS pages, but this is quickly changing. They removed the "export to CSV" functionality, but they plan to reintroduce it soon. As mentioned previously, they really respond to criticism well and update the tool constantly.
• The inbox could use some work. I don't like being directed offsite to view certain comments deemed "requests for further info" when they could just easily display them there.

Incentivized

• The UX is pretty clunky. Engagor only loads about 10 mentions per page, so if my team is behind on tagging/mention resolution by a couple of days, for a global brand that can mean an extra week of work. Would be much easier if the user could choose how many mentions show up on their screen.
• Over the year we have had issues with Engagor's glitches. For example, the user has the capability to publish to a platform (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) through Engagor as the brand. For a couple of the brands we work on, Engagor would show the update as published as one brand, but would actually publish as another. As an agency that handles social media content/community management for several very large brands, we cannot afford to have accidental status updates despite the author's efforts. This happened several times over the course of our experience with Engagor, to a point that we had to forego this feature for those brands and publish natively through the platform.
• It has definitely skewed reporting numbers more than once -- for a set time period (i.e. 30 days, our typical monthly reporting period), the stats for a platform will appear very different from how they display on the native platform itself. For example, on occasion Engagor would load numbers from a Facebook fan count during a 30-day period that did not at all match up with the numbers Facebook showed me. This also applies to the number of overall mentions of a brand/account.
• There is no immediately clear "undo" feature when resolving a mention. There have been times I have bulk-tagged a set of mentions, set all as resolved and then realized that I had made an error, without a very clear way to revert that action.
• Double mentions have shown up, skewing numbers and sentiment/tagging analytics.
• The insights/reporting section could definitely be a little more clear in how it explains metrics (or why the user should care to report these metrics). While we have an analyst on our team who is happy to explain these terms, I can see how some of them would not be intuitive at all to a user who doesn't live and breathe social media analytics. Also, the line graphs can be very difficult to read and parse. If the user downloads a line graph to their desktop from Engagor, it doesn't necessarily show all of the information you need, making it necessary to screengrab rather than downloading a higher-quality visual.

Unless the price of eClincher moves to a point where it is too much to justify, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't continue to use eClincher for our agency. The value at this price-point is unbelievable and we'd be foolish to move to a pricier program purely for the sake of slicker graphics or UI. eClinchers pricing is fantastic, and is only matched by its functionality—it matches or beats any of the major Social Media Manager SaaS programs out there for a fraction of the cost. This tool is great for growing agencies, but would also be useful for any marketing department or large agency that wants to streamline their social media workflow.

Incentivized

Both the tool and the support that we receive from the customer service department and the customer success manager makes me likely to renew the use of Engagor.

Its usability was good until they changed their plans and stopped their LTD program for its early adopters who helped raise the tool by giving it positive reviews. I don't think eClincher is ethical in any sense based on the recent actions.

[In my experience,] due to the fact that they did a bait and switch on their plans and blamed AppSumo for the lifetime program ending is simply wrong. [I believe that] it's unethical to get support and reviews from their early adopters then take the plan away later.

Be patient. eClincher isn't perfect and has some software issues. These issues will be exacerbated if you get frustrated or have a slow connection. If something "breaks" or locks up, just refresh the page and re-do that step. It may take your team a couple weeks to get use to using the new system. Once they've gotten the hang of it, I'm sure they'll love the amount of time they save. I'd recommend taking your time with the set-up. Though there aren't a lot of steps to get everything squared away, you can break the process into small chunks to make sure you're managing your time. To just hook-up all the social accounts, it may only take an hour or so. But, if you want to set-up all the extra tools (such as user accounts, listening feeds, posting groups, schedules, etc.) it'll take longer. I think it took around a day to set-up completely, but your mileage my vary.

Incentivized

There are loads of social scheduling tools out there. I was using Buffer but then found it was limited in terms of listening and reporting so I started to look at a more professional software. I tried Hootsuite but hated the interface, way too busy with the primary focus being on feeds rather than scheduling. Sprout Social I found clunky and hard to use. eClincher was recommended to me by a friend. I think the interface (desktop and mobile) is easy to use but what sets it apart is its support - the live chat is brilliant.

Incentivized

Sprout Social is good for smaller accounts with limited traffic. Some insights available but often questionable data. Only picks up direct interaction (i.e. doesn't monitor likes or favourites). Sysomos was used for a while, but spent ages defining search times still producing questionable data. Did not properly monitor Facebook interaction and often did not pick up from that platform at all. Customer service only operated in US time (we are UK) which proved increasingly problematic

• Makes it much easier to manage our social publishing
• Makes it much easier to manage our social engagement
• Makes it much easier to manage our social reporting

Incentivized

• Better customer service.
• Better detection of potential crisis on social media which leads to avoiding the crisis or better managing it.