How to increase efficiency of online marketing with SocialPilot - A Review
Today we are reviewing a Social Media marketing tool - SocialPilot. Know what and if this product has something unique to appeal to us and other social media marketers to wean us away from better known Social Media Marketing tools like Hootsuite.
Managing social media profiles as a blogger is difficult, not in the least because you have to milk your creative juice in the extreme to think what your followers would like but also because you inadvertently end up wasting time doing something on these social media sites that had not been intended. However, these mediums are extremely important means of directly interacting with your readers and fans and therefore can't be ignored at all. So what most of the professional social media influencers and digital marketing companies currently do in the market is make use of social media scheduling and management tools to increase their efficiency. The most known name in the market for this is Hootsuite but it is prohibitively costly for most individual marketers and mid-sized teams. So we are going to review another such tool today which seems to be a potentially good alternative to Hootsuite - SocialPilot.
SocialPilot lets you connect your own or your client's social media profiles, pages or groups to your SocialPilot account and schedule posts. It can connect to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, VK, Xing, and Google My Business accounts and can set up reminders for the Instagram account. SociaPilot is accessible through the website or through their Chrome extension.Get started by adding Accounts
The first thing you should do after creating a SocialPilot account for your social media management is to add your social media accounts. To do this, go to the Accounts section from the left sidebar and click on Connect Account. Choose the social media accounts you have for your own different websites as well as for your client media profiles if you manage those.
A single account lets you link to a maximum of 200 social media profiles and share 500 posts daily. There is no limit imposed on the length of sentences used along with the posts from SocialPilot.
You might want to change the timezone of your account. By default, the timezone is set for the US, to change it click on the Setting button and go to Change Timezone to select the timezone of your choice.Schedule posting using SocialPilot
Once you have added the Accounts, you can directly start scheduling your posts. From any screen, click on the Add Post button present at the top ribbon of the website. In the next screen add your post URL and a few words about it. Select the thumbnail image, select the Accounts you want to share the post on and click on Add To Queue.
All queue posts can be seen by going to the social profile account in Dashboard.
If you have scheduled a post for the first time, then there won't be any time associated with it when the post will be published. You can use the Edit button on the post to add time for any post on which timing is not specified or you want to modify the post time. However, if you have fixed slots for each day of the week when you want to schedule your posts, go to Manage Accounts, select the right account and using the Select Time section add the preferred time slots for your social media sharing. Once you have added this, any post you add to the queue will be published in the second next upcoming time slot. There is a dropdown available with the Add To Queue button which contains options to share the post immediately, share in the next immediate time slot, repeat sharing of a particular post any number of times or schedule on a totally custom date/time. 
SocialPilot also has Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions which can make your life easy by letting you schedule your post sharing directly from the blog post page. Once you have published your post, just click on the plugin and your post will be scheduled for sharing in the next time slot.
Bulk Scheduling: In the Posts section, there is a feature for Bulk Scheduling with which you can schedule multiple posts at once for posting. To do this you just need to download the Sample CSV file, populate the data according to the format and upload it back again. And the best thing about this is that you can even add image posts with this.Social network Analytics
When SocialPilot says that you don't need to go to your social network pages to do anything related to your blogging work or social media marketing, they really mean that! While SocialPilot handles social sharing quite well, it also takes care that you get to see the performance of your social sharing right from the SocialPilot application. You can access the statistics of your social media channels right from the Analytics section of SocialPilot.
Just like Analytics, you can even access the Facebook Inbox right from the Inbox section of SocialPilot.Other highlights
Conclusion
If we take a look at the pricing of SocialPilot and comparable offering from Hootsuite and SproutSocial, we will realize that not only is the pricing less, but they are offering many more features at rates lower than their competitors. Our experience with SocialPilot has been better than expected except for the disappointment of not being able to share to Instagram directly. SocialPilot has a great number of features that are highly useful and make your Social Media Promotion work efficiently. It has a great user interface and with its low pricing, it is definitely worth a tool to try out.
