Agorapulse Review 2019 — Full Walkthrough and Tutorial

It's one of the strongest social media tools and one of the most affordable, but it's not without its glitches. Today, Agora Pulse is in the spotlight. Welcome to the Digital Marketing Spotlight. I'm Tod Maffin from EngageQ, where we spend our money to test digital media tools so you don't have to. And today we're looking at Agora Pulse, which has been around for a while and slowly been adding some pretty solid features to its, uh, to its quiver. At its core, Agorapulse is a social media management tool, not unlike Hootsuite or Sprout Social. It lets you reply to comments, pull reports, schedule posts, and so on. It also has some features that are surprisingly not on similar platforms, including a very robust fan CRM. Let's start with the most basic function: scheduling and publishing posts. Agorapulse has a beautiful compose window that lets you preview your posts in real time as you create them. This in itself is a step up over similar tools like Buffer, which don't provide a sense of exactly how your post will appear. It also lets you add some metadata like location, or in the case of Facebook, some light audience targeting. I say light because on Agora Pulse, that Facebook targeting is restricted to country. Posting natively on Facebook will give you access to a much richer set of targeting options, including interests and and age. One nice touch I haven't seen on other platforms that AgoraPulse has is the ability to create hashtag sets, a list of saved hashtags that you can use on posts. This is especially helpful on Instagram where you might be using the same business-related hashtags over and over again. Speaking of Instagram, AgoraPulse has a simple switch that rather than posting directly will first send a notification to your mobile device letting you add filters, stickers, and other nonsense. Like most of the tools these days, you can either publish immediately, schedule it, or add it to a queue. The scheduling function adds a nice touch that I haven't seen on other platforms, and that's the ability to repeat posts over a time period. You might have a business-critical post like promoting an always-running promotion that you just want to spit out every, say, 3 weeks or so. Agorapulse makes that easy. But the real power here is in Agorapulse's labels function. With labels, you can tag posts as being a certain type of content, like promotional or user-generated or tips and tricks or funny memes. A good social content plan will have a rough predefined mix of these, usually expressed as a percentage: 10% funny, 30% links to our site, 40% helpful tips, and so on. Or you might categorize by topic: food, sports, news, and so on. Labeling will help you keep track of that mix, and in the reporting section, you get stats on what type of content is performing the best. I can't overstate how valuable this function is to a social content manager. Other platforms come close, notably Sprout Social's tags function, but this is simply the most elegant presentation that I have seen. But one big downside to Agorapulse's implementation of social media channels is that each channel is siloed. There's no way to see a calendar that includes posts from multiple channels, like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, together on one screen. This is a problem that plagues Buffer as well. Sprout Social, on the other hand, will let you see as many channels on a single report or calendar as you like. Agorapulse also has an integrated bulk post feature which will let you either upload a spreadsheet of posts, automatically pull posts from your website blog or spread a series of photos out as posts. Sprout Social and Hootsuite have this feature too, though once again, Agorapulse's implementation is easy to find and simple to use. Buffer, also a big player in this space, doesn't offer this, but links to a free third-party tool that can import spreadsheets. Like all other tools, Agorapulse lets you see your published and scheduled posts in a weekly or monthly calendar. Only in their case clicking on any post reveals its performance. And if you've forgotten to assign a label, you can do it easily once you click on a post. There is some room for improvement on this though. First, you have to know the label name ahead of time because there's no pull-down list that shows you all of the available labels. You just have to start typing and that'll populate it. I'd also love this label assigning function to be right on the calendar view, perhaps with a right-click, or even better, being able to select multiple posts on the calendar and bulk assigning them a label. I also wish you could filter the calendar view to only show posts with specific labels. You can filter posts by label in a long list view, but that's not quite as convenient. But most importantly, there needs to be a visual indicator of the labels on the calendar window. A natural solution here would be to change the background color of the post, because for now all the posts look the same regardless of label. The queue system, first rolled out by Buffer, is used by all the major publishing tools now. Curiously, posts that are queued can be assigned to categories. Categories that, unlike labels, do have colors. It's not clear what the difference is between a category and a label, and you can only assign a category to queued posts, not immediately published or posts scheduled for a specific time. It's a little confusing at times. Finally, on the publishing side, Agorapulse has team workflow options which let you assign draft posts to your manager or client and have them approve them for distribution, though this functionality is only available on plans of $199 US or higher. All in all, Agorapulse's publishing functionality is quick and elegant and easy to use. I give it an 8 out of 10. Another important part of a social media manager's life is engagement and moderation. Agorapulse can monitor Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and somewhat surprisingly YouTube comments, which most other platforms don't do natively. When a comment, post, or review lands in the inbox, you can reply to it or just clear it without replying. This action will show up on the screens of other team members. Going through each comment and deciding whether to reply to it or to clear it is implemented fine, but clicking on a comment from a very active post can get a little cluttered. On Facebook's comments, AgoraPulse's implementation of the Facebook API is a little behind the times. For instance, you can only like comments rather than using the full range of reactions like sad, wow, or laughing. Sprout Social does have this functionality. One very nice feature is that when someone comments, you can see a little bit of information about that person, how they've interacted with your channel in the past. You can ban them from the page, or you can add a label like VIP or employee or I suppose pain in the ass. By expanding that window, you can review past comments they've made, reveal times they've mentioned your brand, or add a note about the person. Though I do wish that notes showed up on the always present window. Once you've clicked on a comment, you have a number of options depending on the platform the comment came in on. You can reply, reply via private message, assign it to a team member for action, reply with a saved template, or add a label such as contest replies or troublesome. And of course you can delete or hide the comment. But if you've got a lot of different message types coming in, and by that I mean comments, page posts, reviews, private messages, and so on, it can be hard to quickly distinguish between them. Agorapulse only has a light gray icon indicating the type of post. Sprout Social, on the other hand, puts different colored backgrounds for private messages, which makes them stand out, and this simple change would help AgoraPulse immensely. Even better, it would be great to assign background colors to people with specific labels. For instance, VIPs would light up in green, while troublesome people might show up in red. That said, you can filter the comments based on their type if you only want to see, say, the reviews. One very nice function that I haven't seen implemented elsewhere with such elegance is automated actions based on incoming comment content. Agorapulse will let you look for certain words, then either hide the comment, delete it immediately, assign it to a team member, label it, or email it to you right away. This is a great feature. Sprout Social, by comparison, will also look for specific words, but will only let you apply a tag, or send an email notification. On Twitter, you can only retweet, not retweet with comment. That may be subtle, but can be very important to maintaining context. It should be noted that Agorapulse also has a listening section which looks for mentions of your Facebook page. On Instagram, you can surface specific hashtags, and on Twitter, you can look for specific phrases. Though I'd prefer these results to be in the main comments list since a hit on a search doesn't trigger a badge number telling you to check that channel, but at least the functionality is there. As for how fast AgoraPulse checks the channels for new content, well, that depends on how much money you give them. The lowest plan at $39 a month only lets you add 3 channels and checks every 15 minutes for content. Plans above that are in what AgoraPulse calls real-time, although you should know that all platform providers are still restricted by the API limitations of that platform. There truly is no such thing as real-time, especially on Instagram, where the API may feed it to a platform like Sprout Social, Agorapulse, Hootsuite, Buffer every 30 minutes or so. Overall, Agorapulse's engagement and moderation works fine, and its CRM module is quite robust, but it suffers from a cluttered look and no way to quickly distinguish more important comments, posts, or messages. But the biggest omission here is that AgoraPulse silos its channels, so there's no single stream of content to review. So you have to look for the badge indicating that there's something to review and click it. But listening hits don't trigger the badge. Really, only Sprout Social has this single view. I give AgoraPulse's engagement and moderation features a 7 out of 10. Finally, AgoraPulse has some pretty solid reporting chops. But lacks some basic export features. You can, of course, get the same data all the other tools provide: audience growth, number of posts published, engagement levels, and some internal metrics like response time and team activity. If you've used labels when you publish content, the report will show you what type of content people are responding best to. This is a great feature. One peculiar reporting feature is that Agorapulse has it a kind of Fan ROI. In the settings, you can assign an actual dollar value to each fan, link click, or 1,000 impressions, resulting in a metric Agora Pulse calls generated value. But honestly, these kind of metrics are a little bit make-believe and may look good to superiors, but really hold very little actual analytical value. It has a content report which lets you sort published posts by engagement, paid reach, and so on. And a very pretty competitors report which will benchmark your channel against other brands you might compete with. But once again, everything is siloed on AgoraPulse, and that holds true for reporting as well. One report for each channel, and no way to get a group or cross-channel report to see how your channels as a whole are performing. To be fair, when I asked them, AgoraPulse says, They're working on it. But the most glaring omission is that, shockingly, there is no way to generate a PDF of a report. All you can do is download a PowerPoint file, and that report is, well, mediocre. The text on the charts are sometimes hard to read, the ROI dollar values look weird, no comparison data at all on competitors, so you don't know from the PowerPoint report whether your competitors are gaining or losing metrics. I suppose you could export the PowerPoint file to a PDF, but that's an extra step and relies on you having PowerPoint on your computer. Worse yet, you can't get these reports emailed automatically weekly or monthly. These are glaring omissions. Frankly, I'm surprised that they weren't rolled out in the first year of the product. In summary, Agorapulse is overall a pretty solid social media tool. Its publishing features, like being able to preview posts exactly how they'll appear categorize by content, and repeat posts indefinitely are outstanding. Their engagement and moderation tools, while a little cluttered looking, get the job done just fine, and you can automatically hide or delete words on a naughty list. Its reporting is okay, but crippled by a lack of cross-channel analysis and scheduled report emails. So that is Agorapulse. If you found this review helpful, please click like and of course subscribe to the channel. Thanks for watching.