In this YouTube video, Areeb Mirza shares his personal, non‑sponsored review of Vista Social, a social‑media management platform he recommends for businesses, agencies, and solo creators. He begins by explaining why he still values manual posting on certain channels and positions a social‑media tool as a backup for scheduling, analytics, and reporting. Drawing on his extensive experience testing tools such as Metricool, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, and others, he highlights the reliability issues he faced with Metricool (disconnects, double‑posting, integration failures) and the high cost of premium competitors. Mirza then walks through Vista Social’s interface, covering the dashboard, post creation, calendar view, media library, inbox/DM handling, automation templates (auto‑DMs, comment triggers with keyword intent), listening/review features, task management, and team collaboration. He emphasizes the platform’s robust analytics, competitor comparison, and custom reporting capabilities, noting how these help him deliver detailed client reports. Pricing is discussed – Vista Social starts at $80/month, positioned as a middle ground between cheaper but unreliable tools and expensive enterprise solutions like Sprout Social and Hootsuite. He praises Vista Social’s responsive support (dedicated Slack channel) and concludes with a clear recommendation for business owners seeking a reliable, all‑in‑one social‑media tool, while also providing a call‑to‑action for his own content‑creation and ads services.
Chapters
If you're on the hunt to find a good social media tool, in this video I'm going to talk about a software that I think you should be using as kind of like your main social media tool to perhaps schedule posts, to look into analytics, and pretty much a lot of the other things that a social media tool perhaps provides. Now, a big caveat to this is I personally, or we personally, still recommend manual posting on some channels and using a social media tool kind of like as a backup, or sometimes just to look into reports and do some other stuff that a social media tool provides. And this is also one of those things where we've I've personally been in a hunt for a long time for a good social media tool because we've tried like MetroCool, we've tried Hootsuite, Sprout Social, all of different types of social media tools. And going into YouTube, looking into a lot of other tutorials, you quickly realize like most of them are sponsored. Most of them are pretty much kind of like incentivized to promote a specific product. So I was like, okay, might as well just make a video of my own and talking about my personal thoughts and what tool do I usually recommend. So the one I have pretty much on my screen is called Vista Social. And now, like I said, we've tried pretty much every single social media tool under the sun, which is it's like either it's Buffer, either it's like Metricool, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, like you name it, we've pretty much tried it. Now we were on Metricool for, I would say at least a year or two before this, but Metricool gave us a lot of issues. Like the accounts sometimes would disconnect. Sometimes, you know, like the post wouldn't go, like they would just remove integrations out of nowhere. It would double post out of nowhere. Like it was just a very glitchy platform. Now of course, the price point that it offers, it's amazing. But of course, we were at a stage, we were looking for something better, something like that can take us to the next step and also make sure that we're not necessarily making these mistakes. Now, what I have in front of me is pretty much kind of my own personal account that my assistant uses to post on some of my social platforms. We still do some manual posting, and this is where we can pretty much look into some analytics on what's going on, all of those sorts. So let me just kind of give you a quick walkthrough about how you can use this platform and why I particularly like it. So of course you have this dashboard which you're greeted with, and you can, of course, if you want, you can pretty much connect every single page you want over here. So I have all of my own socials and I have like the Focus, the company page socials over here as well. If we want to post something, we can just do it directly from here. I really, really like the layout, like how simple it is. You pretty much have the sidebar over here with all of different types of options. Like if I wanted to create a post, I could just have to create Click on create new post and then just pretty much upload a video over here and select any channel that I want the video to go on. It's very intuitive and I really like pretty much how simple it is to use. And then of course, if I want to see all the scheduled posts out, I can quite literally just go to the calendar view and see the post I've made manually. And then also the post that was scheduled by my assistant as well. So all of these type of things you can pretty much see, and you can specifically select a, uh, one channel as well. So if I wanted to see what one on Facebook, I can check that if I wanted to see what went out on, let's say, TikTok on any given day. I don't think we've been posting on TikTok, but I could perhaps check that as well. And then of course you have the media where you can pretty much upload a lot of your footage as well. So if you wanted to just kind of like create a database of folders, you can literally just do it over here because they do give you a specific amount of storage as well. So that might save you some cost as well because you can literally just post or add in all of your footage in here, which makes it extremely simple. You also have your inbox section, which I'm not going to, of course, select any of them. Yeah, so let me just click on Instagram maybe. So as you can see, I can see all the comments, I can see all the personal DMs, every single thing I can pretty much do from this specific channel. I'm not going to go too deep into this because from the conversations we have on Instagram, some people share their personal information, which I don't want to necessarily showcase over here too. Now, another thing you can do, which is pretty cool in my opinion, is create automations. So you might have heard of a tool called ManyChat. So ManyChat is pretty much an automation tool that you can do all types of things on Instagram. And also now I think they support other channels as well. So this is a platform where let's say somebody DMs a word onto your profile. You can literally have an automation where you can say something like, okay, as soon as a person DMs this word, send them this specific link or file, whatever you want. The cool thing is like this platform allows you to do that. So as you can see over here, like I can just click on automation and you have ready to go templates. I'm just going to create that. And then over here you have auto DM links for comments. You just click on this. Set up templates. And I'm just going to click on Facebook, for example, because I don't want to accidentally just trigger an automation that starts DMing people left, right and center on Instagram. And over here you can literally say comments on post, reel, all posts, detect intent. That is some AI stuff you can do. Must include keywords. So this is something where you can literally say something like, okay, so it needs to include the word content and must not contain the word. So stuff like this is something you can pretty much do. And then after that you can click on continue. And then you can literally make a direct message over here. Or you can also do a comment. You can do like more multiple actions. You can either leave a comment first to tell them that, hey, like I've sent you this stuff. So they can literally just go there and then, you know, on the actual, what's it called, on the actual SMS, they can see the link or they can see the link or message that you've sent to them. So very cool. This is something you can pretty much do natively on Vista Social as well. Now, listening, reviews, tasks, like this is something you don't necessarily have to You don't worry about too much reviews. It's just pretty much, you know, like reviews on like Facebook or Google. Listening is something more around like podcasts. So like if you have a podcast, perfect. This is something you can do. We personally don't do podcasts, so like this is not super relevant to us. So we have tasks over here. Task is something you can just create. Let's say if you wanted to just memorize yourself, if you wanted to like remind yourself of some stuff, you can just do like a new task over here. Assigned to users. So let's say if you have your assistant here, multiple people, because we have another profile for Vista Social where all of our client accounts are pretty much attached as well. So we can keep everything organized for them and also for us. So whenever you have like 400+ profiles, like stuff like this becomes a lot more useful because right now this is just my personal account. You just have my personal profiles and focus profiles. So over here you don't necessarily need to go kind of like super crazy with tasks. But let's say you have an assistant, you have pretty much other people who are managing this stuff for you. You can easily do that pretty much in Vista Social as well. In my opinion, it does get a little redundant if you start doing task stuff over here because let's say if you already have like a Slack communication channel, if you already have WhatsApp, whatever you use to communicate, I would just keep it over there. But if you don't necessarily have any of those, you just want to use this specific channel and you have somebody specifically hired for this type of stuff, then you can just click on new task and start creating tasks for them. Now over here, of course, you can see more of, let's say, report stuff. So let's say, I don't know if you want to check like year-to-date stuff. So right now at the time of this recording, it is May. So over here you can quite literally go a lot more in detail on, you know, what type of post did well, what your competitor— competitor analysis. You can literally add in competitors over here as well. And you can literally compare your performance to their performance, which is of course something very cool. You can look into like, okay, which post got the least engagement, highest engagement. All of this type of stuff is something you can pretty much check over here from the post performance side of things. So the analytics and custom reporting is extremely impressive on this specific channel. And that's one of the reasons I liked it. Because for our specific clients, we want to make sure we're giving them good detailed reports. And this allows us to do that pretty much right off the bat. And then after that, of course, this plan doesn't allow me, but you can also do custom reports, which we make onto our client account as well, where you can like, you know, white label that report. You can add in some more details. This specific plan I have, I don't necessarily need custom reports because this is a dashboard I use. But for our clients, I can definitely just make custom reports and, you know, give them specifically what they want to see and what they want to know and not complicating it too much so they can just get, you know, an idea idea of how their social platforms are doing. So this is just kind of like an insight on how this platform works and how you should use it. But that being said, like the one thing I would have changed if I was of course finding a tool is just starting off with the correct one because it is— it becomes an actual pain once you have a lot of profiles to bounce from one profile to another. So let's say you're thinking about using a tool called Metricool. You can definitely do that. You will definitely save a lot of cost there too. But it's just one of those things you have to identify what you're specifically looking for and what your specific needs are. Our thing is we want to invest in a tool that is going to be for the long run. We don't necessarily mind paying a bit more as long as the tool is good and it's actually reliable for me and also my team. Because if the tool is pretty much breaking down every single point and it's just very like the support is lacking and it doesn't necessarily have like 100% confidence rate, then I don't suggest pretty much investing in that tool a lot. And if the tool like this is of course not necessarily a super cheap tool, like it starts at like $80 a month. But even for example, its competitors like Sprout Social and Hootsuite, which may charge you like $200 for like user or something, which goes like, which stacks up quite a bit. And then for no apparent reason at all, because like I said, we tried these tools as well, but we failed to kind of like see the value in what we're paying for. Vista Social is kind of like a good median between all the platforms and their support is great. They pretty much make you a Slack channel where you can ask them any single question at any single time. So we really enjoy this platform. And if you're a business owner who is looking to find a good social media tool, something like that just takes care of everything for you, I do recommend Vista Social. And again, this is not sponsored. This is just personal anecdotal experience I thought I'd share with you because I wish I saw a video like this which would have just given me an insight on how this would be beneficial for my specific case. So that being said, that is pretty much all for this video. And if you do own a business and you're looking for something done for you when it comes to content or even ads related, there is a link down below in the description where you can just book a call with us directly. And yeah, I'll speak to you very soon. See you next week.
