Echobox Social vs. Viralheat (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

Viralheat is great for those who have to report back with hard numbers or proof backing a specific campaign or initiative. If this is important to you, make sure you ask to see examples for the monitoring and reporting features. Also, the amount of monitoring you do will impact your quote, so have that information in mind.

• 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

• Simplicity: The software is very easy to use and took very little time to start optimizing my social media campaigns.
• Set up time: I was up and running in no time. With social media you cannot wait days or weeks to get started. By having a quick start up process, it allowed me to get started ASAP.
• Reporting: The foundation of all business decisions has been a very tedious process in the past. By using Viralheat, I save time on reporting and have better reports to give more actionable insights.
• Data: Not only is the reporting awesome, there are many more insights you can get by using the large amount of demographic data that is in the software.

• 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

• Some trouble that we ran into with Viralheat was with the daylight savings time change. All the posts that we previously scheduled out before the daylight savings ended up coming out late an hour. I thought Viralheat should have fixed this on their end and should have reached out to their clients about the time change and to tell us if we needed to change anything on our end.
• I also want to see Pinterest and Instagram soon on Viralheat. I know this component is not entirely up to Viralheat, but seeing that Pinterest and Instagram are a big part of the social media game, I think scheduling out posts for both these platforms would benefit alot of community managers.

Incentivized

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!

There are no other tools out there that offer an equivalent level of functionality for the cost. We continue to monitor the space to see if we can find a tool that includes paid digital marketing analytics, but all tools that include this functionality are 3-5x the cost. Viralheat continues to be the best value.

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.

I found it really easy to use and I use it on a daily basis and can easily find my way around. It has the usability of a consumer application for an Enterprise product that does very complex things in a very elegant manner.

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

The customer success team clearly cares about how well we do. They are quick to get back to us and they always offer to jump on a screen share so we can understand and learn new features.

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.

We were up and running within an hour.

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.

We selected Viralheat for a number of reasons but the biggest factors were because it had the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) for the features available and the fact that we only had to purchase one tool. During the selection process we demoed with a handful of other SMM tools but realized that we would need to purchase two or more subscriptions if we wanted to get what Viralheat was offering in one.

• 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

• Viralheat has helped me understand how real-life users react to things I build and/or test.
• I’ve gotten a better understanding of my space and the relevant news surrounding it. This helps me build a better product.
• It saves me a lot of time. I’m able to quickly monitor what’s important to me.