Social Media Scheduling: SocialAider Review

category: social media scheduling social media socialaider type: blog

Today I’d like to introduce you to the latest newcomer to the social media game: SocialAider. It’s extremely affordable for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and has an easy to use interface. If are bootstrapping and social media is a large part of your marketing plan, then read on.

Note that in exchange for this review I’ve been given a lifetime account with SocialAider so that I can stay on top of new features and keep you all in the loop as the business and application grows and evolves!

 

Connected Accounts

This is often the make it or break it of schedulers - does it support the networks that you use? Currently, SocialAider supports:

  • Facebook (profiles and pages)

  • LinkedIn (profiles and pages)

  • Twitter

  • Tumblr

Instagram and Google+ are on the roadmap to be added. I don’t often see support for 3rd party Tumblr scheduling, so if GIFs and humorous customer service are your bag, SocialAider could be a really great option for your business.

If you are using Pinterest or engaging your audience in Facebook Groups, I’m afraid you’re out of luck.

 

Pricing

SocialAider has the craziest free plan I’ve ever seen: a 1 year free trial. In fact, the only difference right now between the free and paid plans is the number of posts you can send out in a month. The free plan gives you 150 posts.

That’s a lot. Like, a lot lot.

In addition, it doesn’t double-count posts that are posted to multiple networks. For example, if you created a single post and chose to send it to both Facebook and LinkedIn, it would only count as one post. But before you create 150 posts and mass crosspost them, please watch this video on why that can sometimes be a bad idea.

Some more perks of the free plan that you often have to pay for with other schedulers:

  • Post videos

  • Unlimited connected accounts

  • Unlimited projects

  • Bulk Upload

  • Unlimited RSS feed import

 

Scheduling

Manual

The manual scheduling is very straightforward: select your network(s), write your post, upload any media, then pick the date/time to post. It’s simple to edit or delete your posts right from the post dashboard.

Pros:

  • The ability to create a single post but have two versions of it - 1 for Twitter and 1 for everything else. This is handy because of the shorter character count and the use of hashtags.

  • Deleting an already posted post in the dashboard also deletes it from the social media account.

Cons:

  • Currently, you can only upload a single photo or video, so if you are trying to highlight multiple media you’ll have to go right to that platform to post.

Bulk

You can upload your posts in bulk with a spreadsheet, and SocialAider provides a template for you to work from. You can include up to 200 rows in a single spreadsheet, which works perfectly for the free account limit of 150 posts/month.

The only other bulk scheduler I have used is for Hootsuite, so that’s my basis of comparison here. When it comes to this feature in SocialAider:

Pros:

  • The date and time information is in separate columns which (in my opinion) makes it *much* easier to update each month.

  • You can add a link to an image online.

Cons:

  • Once the posts are scheduled, there is no easy way to reschedule them other than individually editing each post.

  • The scheduler doesn’t differentiate between multiple pages of the same account. For example, if I have my LinkedIn profile and company page connected, the bulk uploader will schedule my posts to both accounts - you cannot select the posts just to go to your profile or just to go to your page (unless you disconnect one of them). The workaround here would be to set these accounts up as different projects.

 

Link Shortening

When you put a link in your post, SocialAider automatically shortens it using Google URL Shortener.

Pros:

  • UTM properties are added, making it easier for you to track the effectiveness of campaigns in Google Analytics

Cons:

  • If you *don’t* want your links shortened, there is no option to turn this off

  • There is no option to use a different link shortening service

 

Reposting

This is a great feature to have when you want to reshare popular content. And you’re not limited to reposting it exactly as-is - when you hit the repost button the edit screen opens up so that you can select different networks, tweak your post, and change the media.

 

Support

Support can be reached via email or Facebook messenger, and they are pretty quick to respond and help you out.

There is a FAQ page which answered everything I needed to know, and some simple tutorials to help you get started once you sign up.
 

Why You Might Not Want to Use SocialAider

As it stands right now, SocialAider’s focus is 100% on helping you schedule and push out as much content as possible at a low cost. If that’s all you need, then definitely check it out.

However, it is missing some features that you might want, especially if you are managing social media for clients that need a lot of reporting or you need an all-in-one solution:

  • Analytics

  • Social listening

  • Network monitoring

  • Evergreen capability

  • Custom shortlinks

 

Why You Might Want to Use SocialAider

I know I said right above that social media managers may not want to use SocialAider, but consider this: because of the ability to add unlimited accounts and unlimited projects you could manage the accounts for a multitude of clients all out of a single dashboard (as long as you’re OK monitoring & getting your analytics elsewhere). With 150 posts per month on the free plan, you could send out a daily post for 5 unique clients. Or 3 posts a week for 12-13 unique clients. Or . . . well you get the idea!

If you are just starting out with your business or with social media, getting going is the biggest hurdle. Worry about analytics and evergreen content later - for now just get your posts out there and start getting some traction! SocialAider will allow you to do that without breaking your budget.

 

 

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