It’s rare that I get the chance to review social media marketing software but because I had already written a POV for my co-workers, I decided it wouldn’t hurt to share my opinion here and get your feedback. It’s important to note that I currently don’t use Argyle Social and my opinions here are solely based off of the product demo I received earlier this month. If you’re a current Argyle Social customer, I’d love to hear your feedback on the platform and how it has impacted your social media marketing. With that said, let’s get started!
Argyle Social is a Game Changer
At first glance, Argyle Social is similar to other popular publishing platforms such as HootSuite and CoTweet. You can easily schedule posts on Facebook and Twitter, review engagement across platforms via a single dashboard including your competitors, and access reports all in one suite but there’s definitely more to it when you look under the hood. .
Tie Social Media Efforts to Conversions
The real beauty behind Argyle Social is its ability to track conversions as a result of social media efforts. What that means is if you published a Facebook status and a user engaged with that update (i.e. Liked the comment, shared it on their wall, left a comment, etc.) then three days later visited your company website and downloaded a white paper – Argyle Social can track that conversion and tie it back to your social media efforts.
How is that possible?
Simple – Argyle Social automatically adds a cookie to users that engage with content published on the platform and leverages pixels that can be added to any website property. There may be more to it but that’s pretty much the gist of the product demo I received.
How is this actionable?
That means you can sort your content into campaigns or “messaging” and see what type of content resonates most with your target audience. Analyze the engagement, assign values to conversions and report on ROI. In addition, if you respond to ad hoc tweets and include a link, you can track if people that saw that link took action and later visited your website.
Branded Custom Publisher
What’s also interesting about Argyle Social is that you can have a branded custom publisher. Instead of Facebook showing that your status update was posted 6 hours ago via HootSuite it can say, “posted 6 hours ago via YOURSITE.” That will then link to whichever site you want instead of the publisher’s site. Companies leveraging HootSuite to scale social media updates fail to realize that Facebook groups all HootSuite notifications in a newsfeed and collapses them. Facebook users then have to click on “Show more stories on HootSuite” to actually view an update. Keep in mind that the most recent update on HootSuite is displayed first. With a branded custom publisher, I would doubt you would run into that issue if the frequency of your updates are spread across evenly versus every hour on the hour.
Build Brand Awareness with a Custom URL Shortener
From a branding perspective, having a custom URL shortener that provides a link which is easily recognizable from you or your company is valuable and helps distinguish your brand. Instead of going to bit.ly to track how many links resulted in clicks, leverage this all in one platform.
Add Your Own Images
With posts you can also link to a specific image that will resonate more with your audience. This is helpful if the landing page you’ll be directing traffic to doesn’t have an image or worse, isn’t optimized with Facebook OpenGraph and as a result, ends up showing a default RSS icon.
Posting Schedule & Frequency
This feature lets you define the parameters for how frequent you want posts to be set live (i.e. post 14 times within this timeframe). Personally, I think Argyle Social replace the arbitrary times and have the posts go live when users are more likely to engage with content. Since the platform already reports on engagement with your target audience, it would make sense to tie in performance with this frequency feature.
Summary
The big take away I saw was that Argyle Social is most powerful in weaving social initiatives with targeted messaging campaigns and back up efforts with solid metrics that you and your company can define in a single user interface. This makes the workflow seamless and requires less time gathering reports from other platforms. Do keep in mind however that Argyle Social does not report on buzz mentions or have a word cloud. Other than that, if you were looking for a more robust publishing platform that can offer a whole lot more, I’d advise that you give Argyle Social a second and closer look.