Recommendations to others considering Zoho Social:
In case you wonder if you need the Standard or the Professional plan:
Both versions have limited options to repeat posts. Only weekly on one fixed day or monthly on one fixed day. Ideally you'd like to vary to make sure that the audience varies. E.g. repeat every 9 days (so posts will be published on different weekdays), or monthly on the 7th and 23rd. Etc.
The Professional version has interesting extras, but there's room for improvement:
- It has a calendar view (Standard only shows a list of posts).
- It has country targeting for Facebook and LinkedIn.
- It allows configuring custom queues (CustomQ) for posts (one or more per weekday), so you can quickly schedule a post for the next available queue without thinking about dates and times. However, that is all it does when you write a post: show the next available queue. I'd like to schedule posts for well into the future, which is possible only if you schedule manually and ignore your queues. Unfortunately, there is no assistance to help pick the best days and times for the queues. The SmartQ feature does that (in the Standard edition too), but only for a week in advance and it is not related to CustomQ. So one has to check the analytics and make an educated guess when configuring custom queues.
- It has a "Time Warp" feature for Facebook, to publish a post at the same (ideal) time across timezones. This is very interesting, but unfortunately, this is only available if using country targeting. In our case, we mostly target the whole world, so we can't use this feature. I'd like a "post worldwide at 5PM" setting, for example.
Features that are only available for a specific channel can only be configured for posts to that channel only. So if the post needs to be published to multiple channels, you'll need to write and schedule it multiple times. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What problems is Zoho Social solving and how is that benefiting you?
The main problem it solves is posting content across channels and in advance. So you can spend time on social media posts once a month rather than every day. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
