Social media scheduling is a life saver. HootSuite drastically limited the amount of scheduled posts a free account can have at any given time. I've previously talked about how HootSuite was my personal saviour, but unfortunately their pricing levels are a bit steep for me to pay to continue using it as I'd previously been for free.

Now, this isn't to say that I'm not happy to pay to play. But when the free option gives you three social profiles and 30 scheduled posts across all three profiles, and the next level up is ten profiles for $20USD per month, along with plenty of other features which I feel to be unnecessary for where I am personally, it does sting a bit. I could happily stay with HootSuite if they introduced a cheaper, more entry-level option. But they haven't, so I'm shopping around, to the benefit of my poor, poor readers.

My first candidate is SocialPilot. I'll be exploring the free options, as well as trialling their entry-level paid account.

Overview:

First and foremost, SocialPilot is for B2B social media scheduling. Most of its features, while seemingly robust and well-implemented, will be fairly useless for an individual trying to build an author platform. It has helpful tools like account grouping and team/client support, bulk scheduling, and at the higher end, some analytical tools.

What fired me up:

Not a lot, if I'm honest.

The user interface for creating posts is far superior to Hootsuite's:

It's clean, intuitive, and doesn't vanish if you dare to hover your mouse elsewhere on the screen. That last part in particular really irritates me about Hootsuite.

You also have the ability to browse curated content, and select from popular articles on certain topics. This is similar to Crowdfire's suggested posts, except you have a little more to choose from. Hootsuite, as far as I can tell, does not have this feature.

RSS feeds are another option, but admittedly one I never really got into and thus don't know much about and don't use. If you have any suggestions on using RSS feeds, feel free to pop them in the comments below.

What fizzled:

I did notice a tendency for SocialPilot to delay posts by up to fifteen minutes. For many people, this may not matter, but I'm of the opinion that if I wanted it to go out fifteen minutes later that's when I would have scheduled it.

Additionally, even when trialling the entry-level paid version I didn't get access to analytics. And it lacks the one thing I like about Hootsuite the most: the monitoring feature. I couldn't see any way to replicate the hashtag monitoring feature I use to keep abreast of the frankly exhausting number of writing related Twitter tags, as well as a few Instagram ones I like to watch.

Verdict:

SocialPilot is a very easy to use social media scheduling tool. It has a pleasantly straight-forward UI and has been very well developed. However, for my personal use, I find it works better as a supplement to a free Hootsuite account rather than a replacement.

Keep an eye on this site, as this will be the first in a series of posts examining the pros and cons of more of Hootsuite's competition.