AgoraPulse Review: Facebook Community Management Tool

I have recently started using a very powerful Facebook management tool called AgoraPulse. The benefits are incredibly deep, so I’ve only begun to dig into the extensive features. But following is an overview of the AgoraPulse feature set:

Community Management and Moderation
Create Facebook Applications
Fan Qualification
Deep Analytics

You can watch this quick video tour that I created of AgoraPulse, or read my detailed review below…

Overview

I have a hard time classifying AgoraPulse since I don’t see a direct competitor. You can create Facebook apps for your Page, but it’s much more than that. I use ShortStack to build my apps, but AgoraPulse also allows you to qualify fans based on the data you collect with apps, and it’s a community management tool (which ShortStack is not).

So if you want to get into community management, you could compare AgoraPulse to BuddyMedia or WildFire, but those are better suited for large brands with huge marketing budgets. AgoraPulse is a self serve product that offers value to companies of all sizes, but falls within the budgets of small and medium sized companies.

Community Management and Moderation

Managing an active Facebook Page or with a large team of people can be a chore, but AgoraPulse makes it easy. Following are some features:

Email notifications of recent activity
Assign a post to a specific person for moderation
Approve, Hide or Delete content
Indicate whether the sentiment is positive, negative or neutral
Tag individual fans or people
Assign automation rules for handling assignments, tagging, hiding, deleting and notifications

It’s easy to fall behind when managing directly through Facebook — losing track of posts that you still need to read or address — but it’s a piece of cake with AgoraPulse.

Create Facebook Applications

I use ShortStack to create my applications, but I am giving serious thought to trying out AgoraPulse. Following are the types of apps that you can create with AgoraPulse:

Document App
Flash App
HTML App
Image App
Petition App
Presentation App
Top Fans App
Video App
Contest App
Coupon App
Fan Votes App
Instant Win App
Quiz App
Sweepstakes App

These are highly customizable — not only the content within them, but the forms and data collected. That data collected then feeds into the tool to allow you to qualify your fans.

Fan Qualification

When you run a contest with an AgoraPlus application, you determine what data you collect. That data is then fed into the AgoraPulse tool to help you get better insight into your qualified fans. How many are interacting with you? How many have provided email addresses? How many have purchased something?

With all of this data collected, you can then assign a value to each qualified fan, making it easier to establish ROI to your efforts.

Deep Analytics

Facebook Insights provides an awful lot of analytics, but there aren’t many visuals to get any real value by themselves. Not only are there enormously useful graphs like this one… Agorapulse Graph

…but you can also load graphs for competitors and show your analytics side by side.

Pricing

One of the many nice things about AgoraPulse is that, unlike products like BuddyMedia and Wildfire, there is a price point that fits any sized business. Pricing starts at $29 per month, but there is also an option to test it out for two weeks for free. I encourage you to try it out.

Not impressed by my video? Check out a couple more put together by AgoraPulse below…