Later (formerly Latergramme) in Vancouver offers an Instagram focused social media marketing platform, which supports the planning and scheduling of content to Instagram, as well as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
$25
per month
Meta Business Suite
Score 7.3 out of 10
N/A
Formerly known as Facebook Business Suite or Facebook for Business, a solution for small businesses used to manage all business activity on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram from one place. It is presented as a one-stop shop where business owners can manage all marketing and advertising activities on Facebook and Instagram. It centralizes tools that help the user to connect with customers on all apps and get better business results.
It's superior. Simply put. Later has better features and stronger functionalities, many of which none of these other tools have. When I used any of the previous tools there was always something missing so I had no choice but to work with two or three tools at the same time. …
The free version is more than enough for personal use. But if you have a small business or if you're trying to grow your brand, it's better to use one of the premium plans. It's worth it. Later is especially useful if you manage multiple accounts for multiple brands/companies because you'll be managing everything with just one tool
Meta Business Suite has been highly effective in exposing our brand and our clients' brands to a large audience. It is also one of the most cost-effective ad platforms for B2B marketing campaigns. The issue is filtering out low-quality leads from a B2B lead generation process, as you often receive as many poor-quality leads as high-quality ones.
Segmentation is HUGE. You can segment by almost anything you want, be it demographic, sociological, behavioral... you name it. You can also create targets based on your visitors and their actions. Even custom lists.
They are very good at optimizing your campaigns automatically. This is so important because it will improve your ROI in several multiples otherwise
Managing ads in general works fine, and the data, even though is not exactly as accurate as Analytics, it's pretty decent.
Gives you placements and different ad types so you can get the most out of it.
Pixel and catalog integration are very powerful. You can almost instantly start tracking and catalog fetches your site daily for updates.
I wish I could edit the look and feel of my pictures within Later a little easier. There are standard filters, but for brand sake, I need everything to be consistent.
I wish there was a direct integration with things like Canva and Lightroom to make uploading and editing my images seamless.
The biggest thing I wish Later did was allowing a better threshold for the free accounts. All of the helpful and useful features are for paid only (video posts, multi-image posts, analytics, etc). I can't justify the cost for just a few posts a month. I end up doing all of the video and multi-image posts manually, which lately has me questioning the benefit of Later's free version as a small business.
The planner enables timings of others' posts to be seen easily, but an easier view of that content (eg by hovering over it) would be preferable
Insights gives detailed information on the performance of posts, but could be more intuitive - and it would be helpful if it flagged particularly good performers or practices.
Sometimes using @ tags is a little slow - and it's not always easy to tell which ones you want without opening another window and testing them yourself.
We have to continue using this tool in order to be effective on this marketing platform. Though there are several changes I wish we could see, the fact is that we will still need to use this product to provide customers with the information they need.
The desktop site is almost perfect, I love it. I love that I can drag and drop, I love that I can easily and quickly switch to analytics and switching profiles... love the ease of link in bio. so great!
Meta Business Suite is a solid, centralized tool that covers the core needs of social media planning and publishing. However, some limitations — like inconsistent Reels functionality, clunky previews, and lack of creative asset organization — hold it back from being a seamless, end-to-end solution. There's a lot of potential with continued improvements.
I've only dealt with the API having issues a couple times, but as you can imagine an outage is not something an advertiser would find acceptable, especially during any ecommerce-heavy time of year. The overall platform could use some help with availability when it comes to authentication, as it struggles with consistency in authentication.
There are a lot of shortcomings when it comes to performance. There are pages that I do not expect to have much information to load on the page, yet it takes an incredibly long time (10+ secondes). I have not had experience with the integration slowing other platforms down too much.
Later are not just a software tool, they also provide marketing advice, tips, and tutorials via their blog. I’ve only had to reach out to them for help a few times and have found them to respond much faster than other tools in their category. I receive weekly emails with updates, marketing tips and invites to online events. I look forward to their emails as I’ve learned a lot of things that I’ve been able to actually implement.
I've found the Facebook for Business support to be hit or miss. For billing questions they're timely and helpful. For complex questions about specific services I've often received a longer wait and a less helpful experience. I'm often redirected to their docs, which are often not particularly helpful.
Take all of the training offered through Facebook first before attempting to create a page on the platform. Learn all of the capabilities available to you. Learn about the different types of audiences who might be interested in seeing your page. Create short video clips as though they are viewed at a much higher rate than anything else. Offer free giveaways or raffles to further build to your list of prospects and drive traffic to your website
I went with Later for the lower cost subscription. The Hootsuite copy features is missed, but Later has hashtag suggestions which is nice. I really need something to post across multiple platforms. I also needed the ability to schedule more than the 5 free scheduled posts offered by Hootsuite. Later has been working great for what I need it to do to support my small event promotion business.
Compared to the other tools listed above, Meta Business Suite has good navigation, great interest audience-building tools, okay ad analytics, a great messaging system, and below-average customer support. We chose Meta Business Suite for its massive user base and for its industry-leading targeting functionality (which is a result of that massive user base!).
This product is definitely able to run at scale, but it would be wise to have enough eyeballs to oversee it and the tools for keeping the campaigns, adsets, and ads organized could use some improvement. I can also see the UI interfering with usability at greater amounts of scale.
Increased social media involvement - Since utilizing Later and another social media scheduling tool, we have seen our growth rise as much as 12% in just a few months. This includes followers, likes, and engagement. This is huge for us since social media is a great way to generate new customers and increase brand awareness.
Easier reporting - Analytics tools on most of the big three (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) are pretty limited. Later is a great way to take a look at our Analytics, and it makes it easy to understand the numbers.
Overall positive ROI has been achieved using this platform. You must have a clear understanding of where your CPL maximums are to remain profitable and either optimize to success or pull the plug on campaigns that are bleeding spend.
This is a great platform to build new audiences or grow existing ones.
Building audience segments via pixel tracking is a huge win for this platform.
