Managing social media marketing across Facebook and Twitter can be a time consuming task. It also gets complex when you are working as part of a team, as you need to create some processes and check who is responding to what. If you are marketing on Facebook you may also be looking at creating apps such as quizzes to help drive traffic and engagement. In this week's SMToolbox we take a look at AgoraPulse, a complete tool designed to make this whole process easier, less time consuming and more effective.
AgoraPulse Overview
AgoraPulse is a complete tool for efficiently managing your Facebook and Twitter activity. It allows community managers to manage and moderate content, launch campaigns, qualify and download user data, track and report on progress. Unlike many tools it also provides pre-built customizable Facebook applications to engage users such as Quizzes, Photo Contests, Sweepstakes, and Fan Votes.
Despite being priced for smaller business, Agorapulse is used by major brands such as McDonald's, Virgin and Playstation and global agencies such as DDB and TBWA. I personally like the team's vision is to offer an enterprise level solution but keep it affordable for small and medium businesses.
I have outlined below just some of the key features for both Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook Features
Applications. One of the nice features of AgoraPulse is the pre-built applications which you can customize and get up and running very quickly. These include quizzes, sweepstakes, and photo competitions. I like the quiz app as quizzes are very popular. Eight out of ten of the most shared articles last year according to BuzzSumo were not actually articles but quizzes. Also the #1 article on the New York Times for 2013 was also not an article but a quiz. Quizzes allow you to engage your audience and drive more traffic and are a key part of engagement strategies for many organizations.
Statistics and Tracking. AgoraPulse provides extensive Facebook statistics to allow you to track performance and gain insights into what works. One of the popular features is a competitive landscape report, where you can add companies you want to monitor and get a detailed comparison report like the one below.
Team Moderation. The tool allows you to manage the workflow and assign permissions to your team members. You can also set automatic rules to help you manage your Facebook activity efficiently.
CRM. AgoraPulse collects data, including from your apps, and allows you to identify, qualify and categorize your most active fans.
Twitter Features
Feed management. AgoraPulse tool provides an inbox so you can see all mentions, retweets and direct messages. The tool allows you work as a team and to allocate Tweets to team members to deal with. You can also tag Tweets, for example for a campaign to track them.
Monitoring. You can set up searches within the tool to monitor brand mentions or any topic.
This type of monitoring allows you to then undertake outreach activity. A good example is AgoraPulse themselves. They monitored the keywords Facebook Reach and then engaged with people as shown below. This particular campaign for their Facebook study helped them gain over 1,000 shares on Twitter in a week.
Scheduling. You can schedule and manage Tweets through the tool which provides a calendar view of your scheduled activity.
User tracking. The tool allows you to identify brand ambassadors or influencers. You can tag and categorize users and export them as a CSV file.
Reporting. You can run a wide range of reports showing follower growth, engagement and filter by gender, location, etc.
Summary
If you are a social media team looking for a complete tool to manage your Facebook and Twitter activity then AgoraPulse might be for you. The pricing is competitive starting at $29 a month. You can get a free trial and try their free apps at their website www.agorapulse.com.