eClincher aims to be the most powerful, complete and intuitive social media management software. According to the vendor, the product is designed to help users, businesses, and agencies manage social media presence with one platform, and offers the following capabilities: advanced publishing publishing automation (queues, RSS feeds, recycle evergreen content) engagement with unified social inbox & live social feeds monitoring content…
$49
Synthesio Social Intelligence Suite
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Synthesio, an Ipsos company (acquired 2019) offers social monitoring and engagement tools. Synthesio competes with major listening vendors like Radian6 and Sysomos.
A point of differentiation is that Synthesio offers a mix of technology and human analysis. In their view, human analysis is required to validate and interpret the data.
Customers are large, particularly French, brands.
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.
It's a very good tool. It covers every need we have for social media listening & monitoring. Bad thing is that those who were selling us the software were not much concerned about costs and were not reducing although there are a lot of market leaders like Sprinklr who are really good with compensation & value addition
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.
Synthesio has an unlimited volume, which helps us to not worry about going over budget. This helps us focus on refining our search to pull in the mentions that have the most value.
Synthesio has an excellent support team. They are always available to answer any questions we have.
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.
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.
Ben Farkas was the representative that worked with us on this project, while we have been very excited with the work he provided, especially the customer service, we just did not have enough time with the product hands on to be comfortable giving it the 10 we think it deserves. As the Data tracking was done beyond our expectations and the finished product (infographic) were all excellent, we used this service to fill our need in being shorthanded to cover the data ourselves. Synthesio provided outstanding customer service, their data tracking and materials where top notch, just we lacked the hands on experience to speak to everyday use.
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.
Everything we needed was handled, in many cases during the first time we used Synthesio the representative made adjustments and explained them to us, some things we did not even consider when setting up the service.
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.
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.
I have used Meltwater, Hootsuite for the same tracking purpose. Every tool has it own pros and cons. The best way to decide is go by the reviews of the people who have actually used it. Budget is yet another factor to consider.
