3 Brilliant Improvements to Agorapulse You Are Going To Love

“At just four years old, our product for social media management was aging — and it was time to make big changes.” – Emeric Ernoult, Agorapulse CEO

Sitting at a quiet table one morning, well before the thrum and hustle of the busy conference was to begin, this quiet, unassuming Parisian unveiled to me his vision for the next major iteration of his social media management tool.

He walked me through slide after slide of mock-ups that made my inner geek-child giddy with excitement. They were obviously moving in very essential directions, I recall telling him, as they were combining streamlined-UI improvements with upgraded and enhanced functionality.

In other words, packing even more in under the {shinier} hood.

Now, months later, Agorapulse CEO Emeric Ernoult and his team have released a major iteration of the tool that, for me, has become an essential element to my social success.

There are quite a few changes but I want to draw your attention to these specific improvements that I think will really knock your socks off.

Improvement #1: Integrated Twitter Profiles for Business CRM

So check this out.

Suppose you’re working your way through the mentions and direct messages that comprise your Twitter Inbox within Agorapulse when you notice a tweet from someone important. Like this one:

Bryan Kramer is an influential marketer and was also a speaker at Social Media Marketing World. Now, Bryan and I are friends but let’s assume for the moment that we don’t know each other, that I just recognized his name.

When I clicked on his tweet, a full version appears in the middle of the screen of course so that I can engage with it, but note what appears to the right of the tweet – Bryan’s shiny new Agorapulse profile card.

Here I can quickly see:

1. 1. Whether Bryan currently follows me.

1. 1. Bryan’s bio.

1. 1. Bryan’s link and location.

1. 1. Bryan’s followers and following count.

I can star Bryan if he’s one of my favorites, and I can click on Expand or Activity & Notes if I want to see some of our past tweets and conversations.

I can even add custom tags to help categorize my relationship with Bryan! Agorapulse automatically adds tags like “ambassador” or “engaged” based on activity, but I might also add “friend” or “speaker” or “marketing influencer.”

Or, if I were you, I might employ a more sales-oriented tagging system so that I could easily mark, track and contact leads!

For instance, you might tag profiles based on the products they have inquired about, the status of their inquiry, and other important factors, giving you the ability to quickly find and sort Twitter followers that might be interested in a specific product and are “hot.”

All you have to do now is click on Fans & Followers at the top and you can filter by whatever tag you wish!

Combine that with the ability to review past Twitter conversations, as well as add individual date-stamped notes to contacts, and now you have a powerful Sales CRM at your fingertips.

(Note that the previous version of Agorapulse did include a lot of this functionality, but it wasn’t as accessible and, therefore, not as useful.)

Improvement #2: Richer Reports for More Meaningful Metrics

Reports. Everybody likes reports, right?

The problem though with most social media tools is that the reporting never really exceeds what you can get just by logging into Facebook or Twitter.

And to an extent, that’s understandable. Facebook Insights has come a long way over the years. And to be fair, the tool vendors can only do so much with the data that the networks make available via API.

But this is definitely an area where Agorapulse shines.

Better Looking Reports

First, just as with every other aspect of the tool, the new Agorapulse reports simply look better. But more than just a UI improvement, the exported reports look sharper which means that if you’re creating reports for your boss or a client, now you look better.

The Old Agorapulse Reports

The New Agorapulse Reports

The new-look reports are continued into the PowerPoint exports so that you can make sure that your success presentations look outstanding.

But that’s just the icing on the cake.

Social Activity Recommendations

What’s particularly enlightening is the new set of Recommendations based on previous post performance.

After reviewing all of your past posts, audience and post performance, Agorapulse can give you recommendations on the:

* Best Days to Publish
* Best Times to Publish
* Best Post Type to Publish

Now, it’s important to realize that since this is based on past post performance, you have to keep that past activity in mind. If you’ve only been tweeting three times a week, that will make for a poor sample size. If you only ever tweet links, you won’t be able to tell whether your audience might actually prefer text, images or other media.

Make sure that you’re creating good data and analysis for yourself by being consistently active with a variety of kinds of posts.

Competitive Analysis

You can also now add other Facebook Pages for competitors and quickly compare their activity and success versus yours!

As you can see, you can compare Fans, Talking about this, Fan posts, Page posts, Interactions and Engagement.

Each account can add one competitive Page for free, and you can change it out to check out someone else’s Page any time.

Improvement #3: Scheduling Posts With Flexibility, Not Conflicts

With the old Agorapulse, you had three ways that you could share a post to a specified network:

• • Immediately

• • Scheduled for a specific date and time

• • Added to your queue

For each network, you were able to specify specific time-slots for each weekday to create the schedule and frequency you desired. You would then simply add posts to your queue and they would go out at the next available time.

While that worked, it was flawed in that, whenever I was getting ready to schedule or queue up a post, I would have no idea what else might be scheduled or queued ahead of it.

Emeric and his team put a lot of effort into making this more seamless and transparent.

Now, there’s so much that I love about the new Publish workflow, I wish I had the time to go through everything with you. Suffice to say, I think you’re going to really enjoy setting up your posts and updates.

But notice at the bottom that you have the three scheduling options (Now, Queue, Schedule) and a Next button. Choose one and the next screen will help you make sure that you’re timing your post perfectly.

Publish Now Improvements

The next Publish Once screen now features an integrated calendar that shows you what posts you have scheduled or queued so that you can be sure not to post when you have something else going out imminently. You can see in the calendar the time and post type that’s scheduled and if you mouse over the post, a thumbnail preview will popup!

What’s more, Agorapulse has deftly addressed the issue of not being able to post now and post again in the future from the same process. Instead of setting up an immediate share and then starting a new post so that you can schedule one or more posts in the future, you can now do it all at once!

Before deciding to post once immediately, you can now choose to repeat a post X times every X hours/days/weeks/months, or schedule it to be shared a second time at a specific date and time in the future. Once you’ve scheduled a specific date, you can also add additional specific dates.

This is brilliant when you have a new blog post you just published and you want to let your followers know, particularly on Twitter. New content should always be shared immediately as well as multiple times that day and the next. Because your followers likely only check Twitter a couple times a day, you can safely share the same content multiple times and catch completely different segments of your audience each time.

PRO TIP: Use the Schedule Again feature when you have an upcoming event you wish to promote, like a Facebook Live Video. You can promote the event immediately, and easily schedule additional promotions & reminders to go out the week before, day before, an hour before, etc.

Add To Queue Improvements

Speaking of brilliant, check out the nuanced approach to Queuing that Agorapulse has added.

Now, instead of just blindly adding to your queue, you can see to the right when your post will first be scheduled depending on what you select, and you can choose to:

• • Queue Next

• • Queue Last

• • Queue Only Once

• • Re-Queue Content

So the new queue still has set times that you control in advance for when queued content will go out, but you can now specify whether you want a new post to go next or slot in at the end like it used to.

And when you want to re-queue content you can now choose X times or unlimited times! If you choose unlimited, you can also put an end date, allowing you to treat time-sentitive content differently from your evergreen articles.

This is the kind of advanced scheduling that used to set tools like Buffer apart from the rest.

No longer.

If you’re setting up shares to multiple profiles, Agorapulse inserts a drop down so that you can adjust the queue settings for each profile uniquely!

You can also add Tags and send posts to team members for approval before queuing, but… devil! Just too much to cover!!

Schedule Improvements

The Schedule workflow is actually quite similar to the Publish Now flow except that the first post is scheduled in the future rather than shared immediately.

You can simply set that scheduled post, or choose to schedule additional shares depending on a repetitive schedule or specific date and times.

All in all, some incredibly useful improvements and new features!

Wrapping Up

My absolute favorite part of Agorapulse which continues to differentiate it from other tools, and save me tremendous amounts of time, is the Social Media Inbox approach to aggregating mentions, replies, comments and other notifications. Being able to swiftly go through the messages that are most important (while at the same time having obvious spam messages filtered out), is amazing.

And the Inbox has received it’s own share of upgrades and improvements, but we’ll save that for another time!

For more on What’s New With Agorapulse Version 6, read Emeric’s own blog post. You might also enjoy my complete Agorapulse Review which covers everything from which networks are supported to pricing and capabilities.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t yet signed up for AgoraPulse, I’d certainly appreciate you using my affiliate link. You can give it a test run, get two months free, and you’ll make me look good to Emeric. : – )

Try The New Agorapulse!

As always, if you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you below.