eClincher, a company based in California and a platform that offers services like those of Hootsuite and Buffer. Yet it is less well-known, although it’s been around for quite a few years now. Then again, its popularity is on the rise, and some reviews compare it to powerhouses like those mentioned. In this eClincher review, we are going to find out why.
eClincher is a social media dashboard that supports Facebook (profiles, pages, and ads), Instagram (personal and business), LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google My Business, Google Analytics, Blogger, and RSS feeds. This platform is more suited for Business and agency users.
There are three pricing plans available at the moment, a Basic plan that supports ten social media profiles and a single user, a Premier plan with three users and 20 profiles, and an Agency plan that lets up to six users manage 40 profiles.
In this eClincher review, we are taking a look at the Basic plan to give you an understanding of the platform and enough information to decide if this social media management tool is the right one for your business or agency. Also, all eClincher plans include a 14-day free trial, which gives you enough time to check out the range of features offered.
If you are interested in more social media management tool reviews, you probably find them on Cyberg.org, so stay with us if you find such information helpful.
Features
As you might know, eClincher is a social media management tool with a range of social media features aimed at businesses to help them get more from their social media presence.
Of course, there are a few extras compared to other such platforms. There is a built-in media library for those that buy the Premier or Agency plans. This feature helps you store and access your images for social media sharing more easily.
There’s even a Zendesk integration to help you manage customers and competitive intelligence reports for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can use these features to get an idea of how your competitors are doing and change your market strategy based on that. And let’s not forget the integrations with Feedly, Sniply, Yelp, Google Drive, and Pocket.
But all of these extras won’t matter if the main platform doesn’t do a great job of basics, and that is what we are about to find out in our eClincher review.
Inbox and Engagement
eClincher gives you a unified inbox. In this section, you can see the incoming messages from all of your social media accounts, which makes keeping tabs on your inboxes easy.
You can respond to these messages or all of the other social media interactions (mentioning, retweeting, liking, etc.) from within eClincher. So yes, you can save some time by using a social media management tool since you can manage all of your social media profiles from a single unified dashboard.
You can even filter out the messages by type or social account, which is useful when you want to focus on something important.
Social Listening
Also, aside from monitoring your own social media streams, eClincher gives you a social media tracker that can be used to track keywords, hashtags, mentions, company names, and many more.
This feature is a must for those businesses that need to stay on top of the news, so they can post up-to-date and relevant content for their audiences. You can also use this to track your competitors and see how people feel about your brand.
You can set this up by going to Feeds – Monitoring Keywords & Hashtag Feeds. Then you need to pick the social media account you want to use. After that, you just need to follow the on-screen prompts to customize your monitor.
Repeat this as many times as you need, and set up as many keyword monitors and hashtag trackers as you’d like. You can even preview the feed to see if it’s right before saving anything.
Post Scheduling and Publishing
One of the features that were noticeable during our eClincher review, was the fact that you can create social media post for all of your accounts at once – although this feature can be found on many other social media management tools, the ease of use of this particular feature was the reason for it to stand out for us. Just write your post, add your links and pictures, and eClincher will give you an instant preview of how it will look on each social media platform.
eClincher can even help you in using tags. As soon as you start typing a username, eClincher will generate suggested mentions.
There’s also a URL Shortener feature built into the eClincher, and you can use its Bitly integration if that platform suits you better. And in terms of hashtags, depending on your content, eClincher can give you some suggestions on what hashtags to use. So, it can save even more of your time since you don’t have to look them up yourself.
After you are done editing your post and happy about how it turned out, you can choose to schedule it for later, or you can post it immediately. This scheduling tool has a neat feature, too; it lets you schedule your content to appear multiple times over a day, week, or month.
These appear in the schedule area below your post. After setting these up, you need to click Done to add your post to the calendar. In the calendar view, you can see where and when you have your content scheduled and how many posts are scheduled each day.
RSS Automation
If you want your own website’s content to be pulled automatically, then eClincher has the RSS Automation tool just for you. Add your website or feed, and a snapshot of the latest content will be shown to you. You can also schedule any item or add it to a queue for automatic publishing.
RSS Automation feature was one of those that quickly caught our attention during our eClincher review, and you can also use this to populate your social streams with content from trusted sources. However, during our eClincher review, it didn’t work seamlessly and failed to pull content from some of the more popular websites.
Content Suggestions
This one is another useful feature for those social media managers looking to find more content for their social streams. Find the Suggested Content Feed feature, type in a search topic, filter by location, relevance, date, and video content, and eClincher will give you some relevant and popular content. As easy as that.
Again, you can schedule this content or add it to a queue based on your needs. Also, you can see how many influencers have shared that content, which is a bonus.
Team Features
Running a social media team? You can assign roles easily from within the eClincher dashboard. Each team member has their own logins and will be able to work on assigned social media accounts or brands separately.
There’s even an approval workflow built-in and an approver role – which is suitable for those users that need to see and comment on posts but don’t need access to the eClincher app.
Ease of Use
Setup and User Interface
As is the standard for almost all the social management tools in the industry these days, eClincher is easy to set up. During our eClincher review, we just had to provide a name, email address, and password, and we had our account made in seconds.
But the main aspect that differentiates these platforms from one another is the ease of use. And by that, I mean how easy is it to add social media accounts, set up a social media posting schedule, or handle other social media tasks?
Adding your Accounts
The option of adding your account is provided to you as soon as you register your eClincher account. Also, an on-screen help menu pops up that might fill some parts of your screen, but it’s helpful if it is your first time on eClincher and you might need help getting started.
Although, it’s most likely you won’t need any help because the process of adding social media accounts and sites is plain simple. Just click on the icon, authorize the eClincher app, and you are ready to use this platform as a Facebook scheduler, Instagram scheduler, Pinterest scheduler, or a tweet scheduler.
But it’s not without some hiccups because, weirdly enough, even after adding your social media profiles to eClincher, you have to click on a check box for each of them to select them and have the option to post to them. This is very different from most other social media management and scheduler tools, and it seems like an unnecessary extra step.
eClincher User Dashboard
Once your account is fully set up, you’ll be taken to the publishing interface, which is simple to understand. The social accounts that you have added in the previews step are over to the left of the screen; you can switch between them easily from here.
The middle section is for creating and previewing posts. You can find your calendar on the right side of the screen, which shows any previews scheduled content you have set up. You can switch between weekly and monthly calendar views using the tabs located on top of the calendar or see previews of your scheduled posts in the calendar.
Setting up a posting Schedule
Ease of use and features aside, eClincher has a downside. If you intend to use it as a social media post scheduler or planner, keep in mind that it’s not as intuitive a platform as other tools on the market – at least not during the time that we conducted our eClincher review. Unlike platforms like Sprout Social, which automatically sets a schedule for you on eClincher, we had a hard time finding the way to set up our publishing slots in advance.
However, eClincher does have a feature named “Autopost with Queues.” This is where you can set up publishing slots and have your content posted automatically.
The setting for this feature is set to Recycle Queue as default. This setting means any content in the Queue will be posted again and again unless you turn it off manually. But it’s a great way for businesses and agencies who want to share their evergreen content throughout the year.
Reports and Analytics
Analytics Tools
Once you get inside of the eClinchers social media Analytics Dashboard, you may find it pretty plain. At least that’s how we felt when we were doing our eClincher review. But once you start searching a little harder and dig a little deeper, you’ll see that it’s got some great and useful analytics and reporting features.
In comparison with other social media management tools in the market, it stacks up pretty well.
Analytics
Analytics provided by eClincher include:
- Twitter profiles and posts
- LinkedIn company pages and posts
- Instagram Business profiles and posts
- Facebook pages and posts
- And much more
Aside from analytics on fans and followers, you can also find information on engagement and top content for each of the different social media platforms. This can give you some idea of how your social media strategy is working.
Reports
Creating reports is easy on eClincher. You can customize reports, add your own logo to them, export them as PDF files and do all of these in just one click. Also, you have reports on each individual social media platform and a useful cross-channel report.
Integrations
Want to get more out of your eClincher reports? Try linking your Google Analytics account to the app. This will pull the Google Analytics data, so you can have all of your analytics data in the same dashboard. It can also give you a better understanding of the relationship between your social media posts and web traffic.
Support
Live Chat Support
Aside from a vast knowledge base within the app – with more than 40 articles, video tutorials that cover most of the main features – eClincher also gives you the promise of round-the-clock and fast live chat support, so fast that eClincher promises to respond within five minutes.
We tried the live chat support feature during our eClincher review, and it took them almost no time to get back to us. Although not helpful, I also got a related link in the answer I received.
So, I tried the live chat support again, and this time was even better. This time I got a response in about two minutes, with a helpful link and a video that helped me solve my problem.
Also, it’s worth mentioning that in both times that I had an interaction with a member of the support team, they were very pleasant.
Facebook Messenger Support
Even though eClincher tries so hard to steer you towards Live Chat Support, I thought I’d give Facebook Messenger a try. We are doing an eClincher review, after all, so I took it upon myself to test this feature too.
So, I asked a question regarding the calendar and auto-posting functionality, to which I got an immediate automated response, suggesting I use live chat support. After 24 hours, there was still no response from a support team member or any human for that matter. However, eClincher does not offer Facebook Support, so it would be unfair to include this in the assessment.
Pricing
Not Cheap, But Valuable
Compared with other social media management tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, eClincher pricing may seem a bit high, especially since both of these platforms offer free plans. But eClincher offers a limitless number of social media posts that you can schedule compared to Buffer that limits the number of your posts based on the plan you choose.
eClincher pricing also compares well with that of Sprout Social – you can find our Sprout Social review here. But it can become expensive pretty fast since adding social media accounts or users, Twitter monitoring, and influencer marketing services will cost you more money.
However, you can pay for your eClincher account and its services via Visa, Discover, American Express, and PayPal. Also, there’s a 15% discount for verified nonprofits.
For a small business owner, the basic plan offers more than enough functionality. However, if you want to benefit from unlimited RSS Auto-posting, Competitive Intelligence Reporting, Team Tools, and customer service integrations, you’ll need to upgrade to Premier or agency plans. With the latter being more a suitable plan for agencies that need to manage unlimited brands.
Cancellations
eClincher does offer a 14-day free trial on all plans, and you can easily cancel your trial from the Account Settings area. If you’ve bought a plan and are paying monthly, it’s easy to cancel at any time – you will retain access to your account till the end of the billing period.
Refunds
It’s worth mentioning that eClincher has a no-refund policy. But I was able to get a full refund after our eClincher review.
eClincher Review: Conclusion
eClincher is not cheap compared to the other social media management tools. It’s not the most expensive either. In fact, eClincher offers a rich set of features for the price.
But there could be some user experience tweaks that would make this tool even better. For example, the UI could use some changes, and I’d like to have access to most of the features without having to search for them. Also, I’d like to have an easier way to set up posting slots. However, the social inbox is a great feature that works wonderfully, the support is quick and useful, and the support team is pleasant.
Pros
- Great Features
- Easy to use
- Analytics and Reports
- Support
Cons
- It’s not cheap
- The UI could use some work
- You might need some help setting up posting slots
- You have to make separate queues for each social platform
