If you are posting content to your social media channels, it is likely that you have tested and are using social media management tools to help you manage your content calendar.
I use a number of tools and as they work for me, I don’t usually investigate others as many of the platforms that have been released over the years are often more of an investment that I want to make for my small business or don’t include the option to post to the social media channels I most frequently use.
So when I was approached by Social Aider to take a look at their platform (this is not a paid promotion) I was anticipating that I would decline. But when I saw both the pricing and the channels that I could use Social Aider with, then decided to take a look.
Social Aider are a Mumbai based software and digital marketing agency with a team of 16 people, and have been working on Social Aider from April 2017 and launched it in Sept 2017 in case you are wondering why you have never heard of it as it is new to the market.
In my experience they have also been very responsive to ideas to quickly update their platform – more of that later in the article.
Below you will see a screen shot tutorial on how to use the platform and I also asked the developers some questions to help you understand how to use it.
I would highly recommend considering testing Social Aider as a platform for social media marketing if you are in the following situations:
- you are managing accounts for clients
- you have several different brands in your small business
- you have social media accounts that you want post to on Facebook (profiles and pages), Twitter, LinkedIn (profile and pages) and Pinterest
- you want to re-post content that you have previously scheduled on your social media channels
- you are looking for a very low cost solution (see the pricing tabe later in this article).
When you look to create an account on Social Aider there is a free trial which is for a whole year. The limit however is that you can only post 150 posts, after which you will need to move to a paid plan which starts at $4.99 for 300 posts per month. The good news is that ‘Post’ means if you schedule a post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest acrossany number of accounts at the same time, this will be counted as one post and not multiple posts, therefore only one credit will be deducted from you account.
The Social Aider team tell me they do not plan to increase their prices as they want to position themselves as the the most affordable social media scheduling tool. What is particularly impresive is that you can add unlimited social accounts and they do not charge on basis number of accounts which many platfoms do.
They are also currently working on integrating posting to Google Plus and Instagram.
One thing to note, and this is where Social Aider may not work for you, is that posts are limited to image and link posts or you can post Gifs to Twitter. Therefore for me Social Aider is not the most reevant solutions for scheduling content to social media as mostly I share video content.
However, I know that many of the marketing, PR and communications teams that I work with are currently not creating video content so it will be a solution for them to consider.
You can see the current features for Social Aider below – note that you can import content through RSS feeds and also bulk upload content.
Once you create your account you will see the option to create a project. If you are a agency a project could be the specific name of a client or a specific brand. For me that could be my own content as you will see for the project in the screen shot and I could have a separate project for my Live Stream Insiders show.
You will then have the option to connect your social media accounts. You will also need to set the timezone for your project.
When testing out the platform I decided to connect my Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. Facebook and LinkedIn works for profiles and pages. I was able to easily delete a number of pages that I did not want to have connected in the dashboard.
When you are ready to add a post you can select the platforms that you wat to post to.
What I really liked was that you could write a longer post, for example for Facebook, and if you have identified Twitter as a platform to also schedule the update to, it automatically opens up a second text box for Twitter and shows you how many characters you have used so you can refine the content for your Tweet.
I chose not to upload an image as the article I was sharing had an image in it and I anticipated the publisher would have enabled open graph tags that would ensure the image in the post would work on social media. I did nowever add hashtags to my Tweet and also added a link to both the post for Facebook and that for Twitter.
Then all you need do is schedule the time and date of your post and click ‘Submit’. If you need to change any of the copy or the time and date for the post to be scheduled you can easily edit the content.
I tested the Facebook post and you can see what it looks like below.
And you can see my post to Twitter below.
Once you have posted your content you will be able to see what content is scheduled for a project, what has been sent (posted), what you have deleted and what failed to post.
Another feature I really like is the ability to re-send content that has been posted. If you look for content that is in the ‘Sent’ area, at the bottom is a button that allows you to re-send the post. So you can do this all from one platform an do not need to invest in aother tool t manage recurring posts.
The post will open up and you can then select another time and date to send the post to your social networks. This will work well for example if you want to send a post to Twitter multiple times and send the post to Pinterest at a later time than when you share it to Facebook or LinkedIn as part of your content plan. Or if you have evergreen content that you want to re-post.
You can see the pricing schedule for Social Aider below with all the details of the features available.
The one thing I did not manage to figure out and have asked the team about is how to delete a post that you do not want to send after it is scheduled. Once you have created a post, it will be counted as one post credit, irrespective of whether you make the post live now or one month later, you do not have the option to delete the post once its created. All you can do is edit it.
UPDATE 10 January 2018: Based on my feedback, the team quickly made an update. Now you will find if you have scheduled a post but you want to delete it instead of posting it, you have option to delete it. Note that the credit for that post will be added back in your account which is also great news.
One feauture I have requested that the team look at is being able to pause posting at times of crisis. This is something that they have agreed to add to their development plan.
So in summary, if you are looking for a platform that will help you manage your social media scheduling for unlimited social media accounts, the ability to re-schedule them when you have posted, and are mainly sharing images and links to your social network, Social Aider is definitely worth taking for spin. It is rare that you get a fully featured trial account and one that extends for a year with a very generous number of posts that you can schedule.
NOTE: Right now video uploading is not live but it has been tested and will be coming soon.
If you have questions about how to plan your social media communications remember you can schedule a confidential conversation with me here.
And if you decide to test drive Social Aider do let me know what ou think of the platform.
