If you’re not familiar with Co-tweet it’s a free service that recently became SocialEngage,  a paid service starting at $7,000  that will replace the free version of Co-tweet on Feburary 15, 2012.  The public backlash has been horrific for SocialEngage and it’s amazing to see a company specializing in social media management basically commit social media suicide.

Part of my job at CyberMontana is managing social media campaigns. I’ve used several different services in the past few years but Co-tweet has been our team solution for quite some time now.  Unfortunately, Co-tweet recently became  SocialEngage, a paid only service.  I have nothing against paying for a service and in the past I’ve used paid versions of SalesForce, Hootsuite, and several others. SocialEngage has decided to hide basic information like the cost ($7,000 starting) and other details. After seeing the behavior of SocialEngage during this transition, myself and many others, are looking for a Co-tweet replacement.

The requirements our company has

• Scheduling – We want to be able to schedule, tweets, posts, updates, etc across all of our social media networks.
• Team – Our company has several employees and each must at least have access. Also sharing and assigning features are preferred. Assigning tweets was a feature I loved at Co-tweet.
• Reporting – It was tough to find reporting and analytic from a service that were very useful. Tracking click-thoughs on the link level with a service like bit.ly is always an option.
• Accounts – The service must support multiple accounts. Ping.fm is a bonus.

I believe finding a service that works for your business depends largely on how you use social media. No one size fits all option exists.

Hootsuite has a free version that allows users to post to multiple social media networks, schedule posts, and some other useful features.  The pro version costs  $5.99 per month and comes with 1 additional team member, Google analytics-driven reports, and several other features. This works for us because myself and on other person do most of the social media engagement. If you need more than 2 people it will cost you an extra $15. Another additional option I found interesting is the Hootsuite University program, an advanced social media learning program.

SproutSocial looks amazing and has a lot of great features. The actually lowered prices recently which now start at $9 per month. Unfortunately, everything is focused on managing your brand. I find this to be less effective for smaller teams. Engagement and influence type statistics are extremely unreliable on a small scale which is where i think most small business are at.  I was also annoyed with audience demographics and other useless(for me) stats taking up huge parts of the dashboard.

MediaFunnel does everything our company needs in a simpler way. What I mean by that is that the account setup, the stats, and team features are there but just simpler and less feature filled. A free version offers a lot of the features and the standard plan starts at just $1/ per user. A very interesting price scheme they have going there.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }