CoSchedule Marketing Suite vs. Viralheat (Discontinued)

CoSchedule does more than just content planning, it helps you organize your content, betters your content with headline analyzers, and allows you to organize your work and marketing calendars as well. If your organization is in a spot where you need a well-rounded tool to help with content, marketing, or even task organization, CoSchedule might be the right fit.

Incentivized

Viralheat is great for those who have to report back with hard numbers or proof backing a specific campaign or initiative. If this is important to you, make sure you ask to see examples for the monitoring and reporting features. Also, the amount of monitoring you do will impact your quote, so have that information in mind.

• Best time to post is great at updating to when we get the most engagement by platform
• Requeue tool to slate out additional posts for a given piece of content is a huge time saver
• Aggregate analytics tool shows us a peek across our posts on a given platform that's actually easier to read than the platform itself

Incentivized

• Simplicity: The software is very easy to use and took very little time to start optimizing my social media campaigns.
• Set up time: I was up and running in no time. With social media you cannot wait days or weeks to get started. By having a quick start up process, it allowed me to get started ASAP.
• Reporting: The foundation of all business decisions has been a very tedious process in the past. By using Viralheat, I save time on reporting and have better reports to give more actionable insights.
• Data: Not only is the reporting awesome, there are many more insights you can get by using the large amount of demographic data that is in the software.

• The import Google Doc to WordPress functionality never worked successfully or reliably for me. So I just manually copy and paste Google Docs to the WordPress editor instead.
• The social sharing counter was not that helpful, because it only counted Facebook and Google+. Who uses Google+ anymore? Plus, now they don't even show the social counter in the monthly calendar view. so you can't see the numbers without doing some extra digging.
• In the monthly calendar view, some titles get cut off if they don't wrap cleanly in the day's box. So I would make it look cleaner instead of having words broken up by a hyphen.

Incentivized

• Some trouble that we ran into with Viralheat was with the daylight savings time change. All the posts that we previously scheduled out before the daylight savings ended up coming out late an hour. I thought Viralheat should have fixed this on their end and should have reached out to their clients about the time change and to tell us if we needed to change anything on our end.
• I also want to see Pinterest and Instagram soon on Viralheat. I know this component is not entirely up to Viralheat, but seeing that Pinterest and Instagram are a big part of the social media game, I think scheduling out posts for both these platforms would benefit alot of community managers.

Incentivized

There are no other tools out there that offer an equivalent level of functionality for the cost. We continue to monitor the space to see if we can find a tool that includes paid digital marketing analytics, but all tools that include this functionality are 3-5x the cost. Viralheat continues to be the best value.

The interface is very intuitive, from setting up social profiles, to posting, to tags, to optimizing for best day/time to post. It's super easy to scan the aggregate analytics. The calendar is very easy to grok at a glance, and the more advanced functionality is intuitive to set up.

Incentivized

I found it really easy to use and I use it on a daily basis and can easily find my way around. It has the usability of a consumer application for an Enterprise product that does very complex things in a very elegant manner.

I didn't have to use their official support, but I can say that they put out a lot of content online to help users. Their YouTube page has quite an array of tutorial videos explaining how things work and how to get the most out of their tools. If you're struggling, before picking up a phone or blasting off an email, try searching for your problem on YouTube or their forums.

Incentivized

The customer success team clearly cares about how well we do. They are quick to get back to us and they always offer to jump on a screen share so we can understand and learn new features.

We were up and running within an hour.

CoSchedule is definitely a more powerful marketing tool than Loomly or Buffer, which are more dedicated to straight social media scheduling. I preview the calendar overview offered by CoSchedule, which makes it easy to see everything at a glance. PromoRepublic is similar but has the added Canva-type integration, which makes it more appealing to our clients who want to be able to easily put together their own images. CoSchedule is a bit pricy, which can be prohibitive for clients who don't pay in dollars.

Incentivized

We selected Viralheat for a number of reasons but the biggest factors were because it had the lowest TCO (total cost of ownership) for the features available and the fact that we only had to purchase one tool. During the selection process we demoed with a handful of other SMM tools but realized that we would need to purchase two or more subscriptions if we wanted to get what Viralheat was offering in one.

• Operationally, it is easier and faster to train new staff and get them comfortable in their roles and with their projects.
• We are producing more content, faster.
• We are more aware of what everyone else in the department is working on.

Incentivized

• Viralheat has helped me understand how real-life users react to things I build and/or test.
• I’ve gotten a better understanding of my space and the relevant news surrounding it. This helps me build a better product.
• It saves me a lot of time. I’m able to quickly monitor what’s important to me.