Sendible vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

I have a fairly straightforward use case for Sendible and it meets almost all of my needs. If you are a small company that needs a collaborative solution to social media content creation, and likely has a small team (or no team) to manage social media postings, I think Sendible is likely a great tool to schedule posts and largely automate social media marketing. A larger company or more involved marketing team could still use Sendible to schedule and collaborate on posts. However, there may be additional features they may want or need (like the ability to promote posts) that may not be available with Sendible.

Incentivized

Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential

Incentivized

• Easy to schedule and post to all of your social media platforms.
• Customer support is very accommodating and always there to help. I have never had an issue with reaching someone whether it was for a quick question or to demo other features.
• They have an awesome affiliate program (example: I earned over $600 from one company clicking through an signing up from my affiliate link - yay!)
• Compared to other social media platforms, Sendible has been the most robust with features and ease of use.
• They are always making advances and upgrades to their service offerings to better meet the needs of their customers.

• The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
• The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
• Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).

• Inbox. The inbox of incoming messages/posts is very clunky. Threads are separated into individual messages, making it difficult to follow conversations.
• Reporting. The included reporting features are limited and don't allow for enough customization to be worth using.
• Hashtags. When discussing the 10 most common mistakes (or whatever the title might be), we are unable to say "You won't believe #3" because the system reads this as a hashtag to link rather than just a number. It adds on editing time when approving posts.
• Default settings. As a Social Media Manager, it is annoying to have myself set as default when looking at the content calendar. I don't write the posts, just approved and schedule them, so manually entering in my writers' names in the filters could be made easier by making this an editable feature.
• Instagram. You cannot post multiple images in a single Instagram post from Sendible.
• Service Lists. They are supposed to be helpful in grouping your services (we do this by brand), however, these lists don't pull the information you put on individual services. So if I have a list with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for Brand A, you can't just add the Brand A Service List filter onto the calendar and see all of those posts that are scheduled. They don't seem to have much purpose at all.

Incentivized

• In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
• Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
• The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.

Incentivized

If I am given a larger budget to work with then I'd like a program that tracks and collects my PR hits, as well as sends me important info to respond to. I realy like the way New Brand Analytics tracks my Trip Advisor,etc ratings

Incentivized

Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.

Sendible is 100% web based so managing social media platforms can be done from anywhere with internet connectivity. During registration, Sendible takes its users on a tour of its main features. The sleek design was engineered by professionals who have great interest in social media marketing. There is ample support in case users get lost and there is no learning curve.

Incentivized

The system meets all my expectations.

Incentivized

Sendible has a great resource center which I have used multiple times throughout my year using the platform. There are plenty of troubleshooting articles and guides that make it easy to uncover the root of any small issues I may have.

Incentivized

Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.

Incentivized

While lacking in some features compared to those big alternatives, Sendible doesn't stop releasing new features every few months and doesn't cost nearly as much monthly as they do for the amount of profiles they allow to manage. Overall I'd say it's a solid competitor if they keep the updates coming and optimize the platform a little

Incentivized

Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.

Incentivized

• It helps my business, to manage my clients social media.
• However I was hoping to capture more people who want to use the tool as DIY which has not happened.
• I do not want to let it go but it is currently more of an expense then bringing in a return.

Incentivized

• Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
• The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
• Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
• Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.

Incentivized