Three months ago I was asked by Promo Republic to review their social media app based on my professional social media experience. I have already blogged about my overall experience, which you can find here but this blog is an in-depth look at the three key sections: the calendar, post ideas and statistics.
Calendar
Possibly my favourite feature as a social media expert – the calendar is amazing. It is clear and easy to see what is proposed, scheduled or posted with a colour scheme that works. If you include an image, an image will appear in the calendar making it easy to see.
I love this as it makes it easy to see when your posts are going live as well as see big key events that could be used to a brands benefit. The best part is the intergreation between ideas and the calendar – if you click on one of the calendar events, you will get a pop up asking if you would like to post based on that idea. For big events, such as Guy Fawkes, when you get the pop up it will even give you an option to choose from their templates and ideas.
This is a great part of this online tool – someone new to social media can start from the calendar and be guided through from start to finish a post that could get them engagement, website traffic and sales. At the moment most of the posts are optimised for Facebook but they are slowly making improvements so I am sure that optimsed posts for Twitter will slowly make their way into creation.
Once you have chosen and tailored the post with your branding, brand name or product, afterwards you can choose to view more ideas or go back to the calendar – this is great as it encourages project planning rather than constantly rushing for ideas.
Even I adore using the calendar – it is very easy to use and much better method of seeing the timings of posts than other existing tools that I have tried. It has everything that a beginner needs to start their journey in social media.
Ideas
Another reason I like this social media tool is that it has a big list of ideas and inspiration to choose from that has images, posts and topics to choose from based off seasonal topics or campaigns. Again Promo Republic have carefully planned out where what calls to actions go where to make it easy to follow.
On the dashboard, ideas are broken down by campaigns for general posts that are useful for all businesses – this allows you to choose from ideas that are based on something you are are proactively trying to do. Basically if you know that your business is running a sale but need ideas of how to promote that, you will find this as soon as you open Promo Repubic.
If you go into Post Ideas it is exactly that – looking for an idea of what you should post when you have no campaigns or news then you will find a great breakdown of ideas to use seasonal topics to types of engagement. It really is a clever system of giving you ideas based off what you need.
Having used this system for three months, it is great to see that the ideas are updated – they also tailor the ideas that you see based off what type of business you are listed as. If you are a bakery you will get different suggestions to help your business compared to a business that sells cars. My only issue here is that there are a lot of businesses that are still missing in their categories but they have grown since I originally set up the account – they are slowly adding more which is good. If you have a Guru account you see all the categories – this is great as you can see ideas that you feel would suit a client and due to how it is set up you can post while looking at any account. If you would like to find out more about the differences between the standard and guru accounts, check out the good the bad and the ugly review of the overall app.
Statistics
For me this has to be the worst section; I have hardly found any use for this section. In both the standard and the guru level accounts this section remains the same overly simple. These days the information that you can gain from Facebook and Twitter about your posts, audience and account is incredible. At the moment Promo republic only covers very basic information which might sound perfect for a beginner but actually provides no real insights that you won’t otherwise gain from scrolling through your feed.
At the moment when you originally open this section for a Twitter account it will open to show you it listed by the most popular posts but this includes things that you have retweeted. If you retweet something highly popular it will screw your statistics and for many new to social media might get confused and only focus on retweeting items (which they can not do from within the app).
On opening the statistics page for my Twitter account it looks like I have had 1397 retweets on one tweet but this is not anything that I managed – that is the original authors success.
If you try to change the order you will only then get to choose between the newest or oldest posts with the timescale (which is generally set to a month). There is no overview, no reach or anything concerning mentions at all! In Facebook you at least have the option to choose by number of likes, comments, shares or date but this is still limited to page posts only.
The long list is well… long and hard to pull useful trends or information from. Using Promo Republic you can not see trends as it is just all the posts listed and with no option to export information you can’t even create these easily in excel either.
With the Guru accounts this is an even bigger issue – if you are managing an account you now have to use a different system completely to pull information. As a professional I have had to pull monthly figures, weekly figures, report on trends and highlight successful posts based on key goals – this statistics section doesn’t provide the ability to manage any of this.
This really is the weak spot of the whole app – it is a huge shame as I approach to the rest of the app to help walk through its users through posting to Facebook and Twitter
So those are the three main sections – want to know about Promo Republic make sure that you check out my The Good, The Bad and The Ugly review.
While I love the gap that this app fills – it is a good start but for a business to make the most of their social media they do need guidance and strategy from a specialist. As a social media marketer for 10 years for organisations big and small, I am a freelancer so that I can help businesses develop their brand and grow their business. If you want more information my services and how I can help your business, email me now on aspender@lillyringlet.com.
Disclaimer: To do this review I had a free 3 month subscription to their standard service and Guru to assess the service.
0 Comments