Our AgoraPulse Review: Twitter and Facebook Management

AgoraPulse is one of several excellent options for managing your social media presence all in one place. It’s not quite as robust as, say, Hootsuite, but it’s still one of the better, more powerful options available. Today I’ll be giving you a rundown, capped off with my recommendation on whether or not you should use it.

What Can AgoraPulse Do?

App building: AgoraPulse’s first and primary offering is the ability to build apps for a multitude of purposes inside Facebook. You can make quizzes, photo contests, sweepstakes, votes and polls, and all sorts of other apps. They all work equally well on both desktop and mobile platforms You can’t like gate your contests any more, as per Facebook rules, but there are still a number of reasons to use Facebook apps.

You can make documents, Flash apps, HTML pages, images, petitions, videos, contests, instant wins, “top fan” recognition apps and a whole host of others. Additionally, AgoraPulse lets you harvest data from the people who enter your contests and use your apps.

Community management: There are a number of platforms that allow you to build and manage a community based on Facebook, but almost all of them are geared towards large corporations. The solution Coca-Cola uses probably isn’t affordable or useful for a small business with a few thousand followers, right? AgoraPulse allows you to manage your community in a number of ways. You get notifications via email when there’s new activity on your feed. You can send posts to moderators for moderation. You can approve or remove content. You can tag people in posts, and you can create automated moderation actions, to filter out abusive comments and the like.

As an added bonus, you can also tag comments with sentiment, ranging from positive to neutral to negative. This helps you codify and track your brand sentiment, as well as scroll back and recognize positive sentiment over time.

Analytics: No platform would be complete without an analytics suite attached, and AgoraPulse has quite of bit of deep analytics included. It takes most of its data right from Facebook Insights, but it layers over a nice graphical display, so you can see what looks like tables and numbers instead filtered into graphs and charts.

You also get a surprising amount of competitive analysis. You’ll have to pay for some data on your competitors, but you can see a lot of the Insights data side by side with your own. This is hard to get from other sources, and it’s really quite valuable if you’re into that kind of thing.

Twitter: Many of the same features that AgoraPulse brings to Facebook, it also brings to Twitter. You have your feed management, your inboxes all presented in front of you, your keyword and hashtag monitoring, your user management, your scheduling and your analytics, all in one package. That seems like a lot for a single paragraph here, but I don’t consider it super noteworthy; it’s all bog standard for any Twitter management platform.

Pricing

Okay, so maybe I’ve sold you on the features, or maybe you want a little more information before you jump. So, how’s the pricing?

First of all, you can run a free trial, or you can use some of their free tools, with no obligations attached. No shady “call us to cancel in a week or else we’re charging you” contracts for the free trials. The free trial is 15 days.

Secondly, every plan has some commonalities. Use of their applications is not limited by plan level. Everything works on mobile as well as desktop. You’re not limited in your ability to create content trough the platform, and you’re able to access all of the automated moderation features. Twitter integration is included as well.

So what are the price points? How are they divided? In general, it’s a matter of scale. If you have X amount of fans, you can use Y plan. Too many fans and you’ll need a higher priced plan.

• $29 per month allows you to hook into one Facebook page and one Twitter account with up to 6,000 fans on Facebook and up to 3,000 monthly tweets.
• Scale up to 2 Facebook and Twitter accounts with up to 50,000 fans and 30,000 tweets and it’ll cost you $49/month.
• Hook into up to 5 Facebook and Twitter accounts with up to 150,000 fans and 100,000 tweets monthly, and it will cost you $99 per month.

There’s also a higher-tier scaleable option. Have more fans? Need to use more accounts? They have scaling enterprise solutions. These range from $149 per month for 12 accounts and 500,000 fans all the way up to 200 pages, 20 million fans, and $1,999 per month.

Additionally, if you pay on an annual basis rather than a monthly basis, the monthly cost goes down. The prices for the three packages end up working out to $19, $39 and $79 monthly, when billed annually.

One important thing to note is that only the top tier and enterprise versions offer white label – that is, not branded with the AgoraPulse logo – versions of the software and apps. If you’re concerned about the appearance of a competing logo on your content, you need the higher tier plans just to get rid of it.

There’s also a 100% guaranteed refund, no questions asked, for the last month of your service if you’re not satisfied.

Should You Use AgoraPulse?

I consider AgoraPulse a great tool, but it’s sadly limited in scope. The Twitter integration does a lot to help this problem, but at the end of the day, it’s still limited to just Facebook and Twitter, with a heavy emphasis on Facebook. You can find the same Twitter features just about anywhere, including using Twitter’s own TweetDeck.

The way I see it is like this. If you’re a small business and you’re focusing almost entirely on Facebook, AgoraPulse is both incredibly cheap and incredibly useful. You may have to pay for the one-step-up plan in order to cover the number of fans you have, or if you have two Twitter accounts with one dedicated customer service line, but otherwise it’s perfect.

If you’re a larger business, AgoraPulse seems like a good deal, but I’m not sure it is. Sure, they have flexible plans that scale up into millions of fans. The thing is, at that point, you’re not focused entirely on Facebook. Chances are, you’re using LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ and a range of other sites, so AgoraPulse becomes less convenient. You’d need a more robust, multi-platform solution.