Echobox Social vs. Wildfire Interactive (Discontinued)

Echobox Social is well suited to publishers and media organisations who are publishing daily online content that needs sharing across social platforms. It works best if your social media objective is driving traffic to your articles/website. It would be suitable for both small and large organisations, as it allows multiple users with different access.

Incentivized

The transition to Google has been painful - key contacts are no longer available.

• Organizes our social media posts across both Facebook and Twitter
• Easy scheduling of posts, with AI driving the scheduling of optimal times for each story
• AI ferrets out best-performing posts and schedules them during the weekend and other downtimes when we are not actively engaging our readers

• Content scheduling on FB, TW, and PIN
• Social media management
• Basic analytics of post engagmemt

Incentivized

• Since I'm Brazilian, and our whole team is based in Brazil, would be great if the whole platform was translated for Portuguese. There are no many English speakers in Brazil, to be honest. That would make it easier
• Tik Tok. Would be nice if somehow Echobox could provide their AI for Tik Tok Users

• The entire product is quite dated - in our two years with the product, only the visuals have been updated. While other products have added things like multi-platform entries, Wildfire is essentially the same as it has been since our first experience with it.
• In its self-service mode, the product lacks some essential features like mandatory likes and white label.
• Embedding a whitelabel contest is a major undertaking, and requires quite a bit of work within the Facebook developer panel.

Because I am totally satisfied with Echobox service. I find it balanced between the service itself and its cost. Compared to its competitors, it is, without a doubt, the best product for small publishers. It only lacks in a greater and more efficient management of statistics which, at the moment, is absent. I will definitely renew Echobox!

Our initial contract with Wildfire Whitelabel was for $30,000/year, as we progressed we found several alternatives for significantly less. We used this to our advantage to lower the second year to $17,000 with the limitation in the level of support (they call this their "core" subscription). Support has been quite bad.

During our contract, we also asked for quotes on some custom work, but never managed to get an answer (or actual quote). Now two years into our contract, the limitations and lack of development are enough for us to find a different solution. Newcomers to the market like Rafflecopter, WooBox and PunchTab are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price

Echobox Social's user interface is straightforward to navigate and even members of our team who are not necessarily social media specialists can step in when needed. The schedule queue is very easy to understand, meaning different team members can see what content is scheduled to be posted. When trying to edit the automation settings, each feature is well explained if you hover over the question mark button.

Very easy to use, almost anyone can learn how to build a comprehensive promotion.

I have never been kicked out of Wildfire service. Always up and running.

Easy to perform tasks and quick to upload changes to your promotions.

When there have been problems, they’ve usually been resolved very quickly. Some issues have occurred such as not being able to download images or posts not going out when the service has crashed, but they’re also very open to feedback. The option to download pictures loaded into the feed stories was my suggestion; saving us time creating new images and getting the posts out quickly

Incentivized

Phone and email support were always available to us when we needed it.

Gave me a thorough rundown on everything the software does. Sometimes it is difficult to run through it all over the phone/internet, but I was able to figure it out myself.

You just have to keep in mind that it can take a day or two to have the set up of an account all done.

Simple to use and very effective in increasing user engagement on both social channels and website. Noticeably helped raise TOS.

Echobox AI function (the ability to decide when is the best time to share a post) is a [game-changer] and also the UI is cleaner and easier to use. I found Hootsuite confusing and complicated. It has too many windows and also doesn't pull the articles automatically. There is no comparison really, Echobox is miles ahead.

Wildfire was a merely an adequate social media tool when it existed as a standalone, but it just couldn't compete against other players like Sprout, Falcon, and Sprinklr.

Incentivized

• Positive impact: time-saving. We have saved on staff costs and other staff are able to focus on more skilled tasks than manual scheduling
• Positive impact: improved output. We have seen an increase in traffic, page views, and more digital subscriptions and email sign-ups since we started using Echobox

Incentivized

• Our TOS and engagement with our fans increased when implementing this.
• Social metrics Wildfire provided for the different brands allowed sales opportunity to increase social worth and ultimately increase cost on advertising initiatives.