The problem with most social media management solutions is that they’re either too simple or too expensive. I’ve seen some great tools for managing your Facebook or Twitter accounts, or multiple accounts, plus your blog, YouTube and more from one dashboard, but nothing that allows you to do that for more than hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. I’ve seen the ability to automatically moderate Facebook walls as functionality built into a larger solution, like a monitoring service, but they don’t offer the management piece as a separate item.
The barrier to entry to just do simple moderation and management, which is what a lot of small- to medium-sized businesses are looking for, is too high.
Conversocial, however, comes close to providing an option. While it’s team package pricing is based on the volume of incoming messages, which makes your monthly fee somewhat unpredictable, the entry fee is $250 per month US for up to 1,500 messages. Most small businesses easily fit under that threshold. You get hot, though, and you can quickly see up to $1,500 per month (30,000 incoming messages) on your invoice.
The service’s unlimited package is $200 per month, per user, but you have to have at least 10 users to qualify for what they call their “Enterprise Package.”
So the price point is better, of not perfect, for the little guy. So what does the software actually do?
Conversocial gave me a free, two-week trial account (and will give you one, too … 14-day free trials are available to anyone on their website) to test. While I did not have the ability to connect to Twitter for some reason, I did like the tool as a Facebook management solution. With it, you can:
- Set automatic moderation (flag or delete posts) for your wall based on certain keywords. The system even has a built in foul language keyword list built for you.
- Drive all notifications of posts, flagged posts, etc., to your email inbox, allowing you to focus on your work until Facebook needs your attention
- Approve, deny, delete, like, unlike or comment on any Facebook wall post directly from the tool
- Create workflow task assignments to your team to direct them to follow up and respond to any selected post
- Create and manage Wall Posts/Updates to your Facebook Page, including scheduling posts, directly from the tool
- Monitor trends of metrics like number of fans, engaged fans and post engagement (even with “active” and “passive” — think comment vs. like — engagement delineated)
- Automatically set RSS feeds to post items (like blog posts or news updates) directly to your Facebook page
Comparing Conversocial to other tools is really unfair since most that offer management of Facebook pages are originally intended for some other purpose (like Sysomos’s Facebook Fan Page Central which is an add-on component of their social media monitoring solution). HootSuite does most of the above mentioned, but doesn’t yet offer auto-moderation features for Facebook pages. It was intended to be a Twitter client, however.
So if Facebook page moderation and workflow is something you’re looking for but can’t quite put a finger on where to turn, Conversocial might be a solution for you. For most small businesses, you’re looking at $250 per month. While I can think of a ton of reasons that’s too much for some to pay, I can think of several businesses (single location restaurant or retail store with an active fan page) where that might make a ton of sense.
Conversocial does offer the ability to post and respond within the tool, but it is also not to be mistaken with the more robust competitors in this space. Expion (client), Buddy Media, Involver, Fan Appz, Wildfire and LiveWorld, among others, offer more robust content management solutions for Facebook-specific work.
Are you using Conversocial? Is there another tool out there that offers automatic moderation based on keywords that is more economical for the little guy? Please share. The comments are yours.
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