In this digital age, social media marketing has become essential to brand building. It is no surprise that companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google spend millions of dollars a year on social media promotions. And any businesses that have not yet embraced an online presence should take advantage of social media before they become irrelevant.
Now, to make the most of your social media campaigns, you need tools – the right equipment that makes your job easier and more efficient. Thankfully, there are tons of social media marketing and management solutions available today- some cheap, others not. We have already reviewed some of them on our blog (feel free to check them out). And today, we are reviewing another one - SocialBee.
Maybe you have heard of it, maybe not. Either way, let’s jump right into it!
What is SocialBee?
SocialBee is a social media management tool, designed to help businesses and individuals build and grow their online presence, especially on social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. The tool comes equipped with features like content scheduling, content curation, analytics, and social media automation – pretty much everything to make your social media journey a breeze.
Be warned that SocialBee is not as comprehensive as dedicated solutions like Sprout Social or Hootsuite. But coming with a smaller price tag, it should take care of your day-to-day social media tasks. Well, the best way to know if it is worth your attention is to take a quick look at the things it can do for you. So let’s take a peek.
1. Content Scheduling
A thing worth mentioning here is that SocialBee is primarily a content publishing and scheduling solution. There is support for all major social networking platforms including Pinterest. The tool has a user-friendly interface where you can compose your social media posts. You can add text, images, videos, and links to make your content more engaging. It also supports bulk uploading, letting you upload multiple files/posts simultaneously.
Once you have composed your post/message, it is ready to be published or scheduled for publishing. There is a calendar view with an easy drag-and-drop feature to schedule posts for specific dates and times. This feature comes in handy when planning campaigns or time-sensitive events.
Here is another thing that is quite interesting about SocialBee - an ability to define the posting frequency for each social media platform so you can maintain a consistent online presence without overwhelming your audience. Also, there are content queues - simple collections of posts that rotate and repeat depending on the specified scheduling rules. With content queues, your social media profiles remain active even when you have no new content to share. Pretty cool, right?
2. Content Curation
With SocialBee, discovering, organizing, and sharing relevant and valuable content is a breeze. With its content discovery feature, you can search for articles, blog posts, and other types of content based on specific keywords/topics. The content is aggregated from different sources such as news sites, blogs, reliable publications, etc., and can be quickly added to your content queue for publishing or scheduling.
Also, you can create different content categories or topics to organize the content you discover. This helps you maintain a structured system and makes finding specific content easier when needed. Interestingly, SocialBee also lets you recycle your evergreen content (posts retaining their relevance over time). So, you can schedule the republishing of your best-performing content at regular intervals, expanding its reach and optimizing its impact.
3. Team Collaboration
Managing multiple social media accounts can often be overwhelming for a person. But with SocialBee at your disposal, you don’t have to worry about that because it comes with some impressive team collaboration features. For example, it gives you the flexibility of creating different workspaces for different accounts you manage so that everything is streamlined and runs smoothly.
And these workspaces let you add members with different roles and rights, offer feedback, post internal comments, tag members into posts, and more.
4. Audience Management
It is not uncommon for public accounts to be followed by fake or inactive accounts. Thanks to SocialBee, you can filter out the profiles that are fake or inactive or don’t follow you back. It can all be managed from the “Audience” page and it is quite straightforward. This page has many useful tabs such as User Search, Competitor Audience, Fans, Non-followers, Whitelist, Blacklist, and Profile Check.
So, you can unfollow the non-followers and maintain a healthy followers/following ratio. Also, you can follow back accounts you don’t follow – with the Fans tab. If you have any certain accounts that you would like to connect with later, you can add them to your Whitelist. Use the Keyword Search tab to discover relevant accounts.
5. Analytics and Reporting
Paying attention to the performance of your content is essential to your social media growth. SocialBee provides you with the right set of tools that let you keep tabs on how your audience is receiving your content. Within its dashboard, you get access to four key types of statistics – Audience (demographics), Post Analytics, Page Analytics, and Engagement Status.
These insights help identify the opportunities for improvement and the necessary adjustments you need to make to your social media strategy.
6. Integrations
SocialBee can integrate with RSS feeds from your favorite blogs or websites. It lets you automatically share new content from those sources on your social media profiles, helping you curate relevant and engaging content for your audience.
Another appealing integration is with Canva, which is ideal for seamlessly creating content without leaving the SocialBee content editor. With the click of a button, you gain access to all the Canva functionalities – from creating graphics from scratch to making small adjustments to your project. How convenient, right?
Not just that. SocialBee can seamlessly integrate with Unsplash, Buffer, Bitly, Hootsuite, PixelMe, Pocket, Quuu, and more.
7. Pricing
SocialBee has three pricing plans for solopreneurs and small businesses – Bootstrap ($29/mo), Accelerate ($49/mo), and Pro ($99/mo). The three plans offer five, ten, and twenty-five social profiles respectively. In the Pro plan, you get access to five workplaces instead of just one.
When billed annually, it costs 16% less. Oh and yes, there is a 14-day free trial.
Final Thoughts
When it comes to social media content creation and scheduling, SocialBee is by far one of the most affordable options available. The tool is fundamentally designed to automate your social media. Thanks to its excellent content curation features, you can set up some content sources and publishing schedules and you can go weeks without manually creating a post. It offers integration with Zapier so get access to more sources. And we have not even told you about the AI caption generator yet.
However, SocialBee does not have any listening/monitoring features. It is probably because it was designed to be exclusively a scheduling tool. So, if you think your business needs advanced features like that, you may want to invest in comprehensive solutions like Hootsuite or Sprout Social.
Anyway, SocialBee offers a 14-day free trial so you will have enough time to play around with it and see if it fits your needs.