SocialPilot Review 2024 – Is It Worth Trying?

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A Solid Social Media Scheduler, but Does It Do Enough?

Compared with other social media management tools for teams and agencies, SocialPilot has a good reputation. Many SocialPilot reviews talk about how easy it is to use compared to other agency social media scheduling tools.

SocialPilot supports all the major social media networks, making it a useful all-round social media dashboard. You can create and schedule posts for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business, Pinterest, TikTok and YouTube.

That means it works well as a Facebook scheduler, Pinterest scheduler, tweet scheduler, or Google Business post planner.You can even schedule short-form video content such as Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, and TikTok videos – although not that TikTok videos can’t be scheduled directly.

SocialPilot’s social media tool has five plan offerings: Professional, Small Team, Studio, Agency, and Enterprise:

• The Professional plan lets you manage 10 accounts.
• The Small Team plan lets 3 team members manage 20 social media accounts.
• The Studio plan lets 6 team members manage 30 social media accounts.
• The Agency plan lets 9 team members manage 50 social media accounts.
• The Enterprise plan is fully customizable, based on your company’s needs. You’ll need to schedule a phone call to discuss the plan.

There’s a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) with all plans. While there’s no free plan, that’s more than enough time to test all of SocialPilot’s features.

In this in-depth review, I’m going to test SocialPilot’s Studio plan to see whether it’s the right social media dashboard to meet your business needs.

I tested this tool as part of a larger project rating all of the top social media management tools.

A Publishing Powerhouse – but No Social Listening

SocialPilot includes a number of helpful features that mean it consistently ranks as one of the best social media management tools. You can schedule posts in bulk via CSV, include multiple images, and use a URL shortener for branded social media URLs.

There’s also a handy browser extension for sharing on the go, and SocialPilot’s mobile app includes image editing functionality.

Social Inbox and Engagement

SocialPilot’s social inbox currently lets you monitor your Facebook, Google Business, YouTube and Instagram accounts. 

The interface is simple and clear, although I wasn’t able to see comments on older content – you can only access comments that have been posted in the last 30 days, and inbox messages received in the last 7 days. And while this worked well for the accounts SocialPilot does link with – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google Business – I did find that I couldn’t use the tool for any other social media channels.

Social Listening

SocialPilot is heavily focused on publishing and scheduling content. So it’s no surprise that it doesn’t really include social listening features.

As I noted earlier, you can handle messages and comments from multiple social media sites. But if you’re looking for a social media tracker or hashtag tracker, this probably isn’t the right tool for you. Try Sprout Social for more robust social listening options.

Publishing and Scheduling Posts

SocialPilot is a good social media scheduling tool, offering automated posting for multiple social media platforms (apart from TikTok, which you can schedule, but you have to post manually).

Click on the Posts tab and you can start a new social media post simply by posting a link. Separate social media tabs let you customize the same post for each platform, which is pretty neat.

SocialPilot automatically pulls in images and post details and gives you an instant preview of what you’ll be posting. You can also use built-in tools to add images, videos or GIFs, or design an image to go with your post on Canva – or use the native image editor to tweak your images before posting. This is a useful integration.

The post preview lets you see how the post will look on each channel. Then you can share it immediately, schedule it, or add it to your queue.

Another cool feature is that you can set the post to repeat up to 9 times over a number of days. This is great if you want to get maximum attention for a particular piece of content.

Once you’ve scheduled a piece of content you can see it in your dashboard or via the content calendar, where you can change the schedule via drag-and-drop. You can also easily tag users on each platform to extend the reach of your content.

One downside is that, for TikTok scheduling, you get a notification when it’s time for the post to go live so you can publish it yourself. It would be great if this happened automatically.

Team Features

SocialPilot is a tool built for teams and agencies, and it shows. As an account owner, you can easily add team members with a couple of clicks. In a single interface, you can choose whether to give team members admin access to accounts, and which features they can manage (like adding feeds, connecting accounts, and boosting posts).

You can set individual permissions for each social media site, depending on whether you want team members simply to schedule content, or to be able to look at analytics and the social inbox.

Content created by people with the Content Scheduler role goes into the approval workflow. You can find and approve these via the Posts tab. Note that each team member gets an individual account for managing team content – so this can’t be used for their personal social media feeds.

On the Small Team plan and above, you can also invite clients to the platform and decide whether they can view, create or promote content.

Suggested Content

If you’re looking for a way to keep your social media accounts populated with relevant content, SocialPilot has you covered. Go to the Content & Feed tab, type in a keyword, and you’ll immediately see the most relevant results.

Select your social media sites, and you can add them to your queue and have them scheduled with a click. It’s super simple, and a serious timesaver for busy business owners. You can sort results by publication date, and shorten or lengthen the period you’re looking at.

You can also search for content by influencers and share or schedule it with just a couple of clicks.

One of the most useful features of a social media monitoring tool is the ability to monitor blog and website feeds and add this content to your social media queue.

SocialPilot makes this easy. Add a feed and some relevant hashtags, then choose how often the app checks the feed and how many posts it should pull in. This content will share automatically unless you turn it off.

External Integrations

When it comes to integrations, SocialPilot keeps it simple, with just over 10 apps. Its integrations include apps for URL shortening (Bitly, Sniply, and Rebrandly), browser extensions, and Canva for creating images, and DropBox and Box for media uploads.

But don’t be put off by how short this list is! SocialPilot includes Zapier which gives you the possibility of integration with hundreds of other apps that your team might use.

Getting Started with SocialPilot Is Simple

It doesn’t take long to grab a free trial of SocialPilot and start setting up your account. You can fill out a short form or link the app to your Facebook or Twitter account – but social sign-on doesn’t save much time, as you’ll still be prompted to fill out the rest of the form.

Either way, the process takes less than a minute, and once you’re in your dashboard, there’s a handy reminder at the top of when your free trial ends.

Connecting Social Accounts

The next step is to connect your social media accounts. To make things easy for you, SocialPilot provides in-app cues to help you get started with connecting your accounts. Alternatively, use the email they send with a link to a getting started guide that walks you through the steps.

Or, simply click on the Accounts icon to add a new account.

SocialPilot offers several social media accounts via a simple and intuitive interface. Click the one you want, complete the validation process, and you’re ready to start scheduling content.

Note that if you used a social media account to set up your SocialPilot account, the account you added will already be in your SocialPilot dashboard. As I’ll go into below, this is a bit of a mixed blessing.

Default Social Media Posting Schedule

One nice feature of SocialPilot is, that when you add a social media account, it automatically creates a posting schedule for your content. You can tweak this, of course, but it makes it much quicker to get started on actually sharing content.

However, this didn’t actually happen with the account I used for social sign-on. I had to delete the account and add it again to get the automatic posting schedule. I don’t know what went wrong, but it’s not usually a good sign when something’s a bit glitchy just when you’re getting started! Still, it worked fine the second time I added it, at least.

Grouping Accounts

If you’re an agency or have a large team, managing multiple social media accounts can become difficult. That’s why SocialPilot’s grouping feature is so handy. It lets you put social media accounts into a group so you can work with all those accounts at the same time. This is seriously useful for working with RSS feeds and content suggestions, as well as creating social media posts.

Automatic Analytics Makes Life Easy for Social Media Managers

To get access to SocialPilot’s social media analytics, just click on the Analytics tab. SocialPilot provides analytics for Facebook pages, LinkedIn pages, Google Business profiles, and Twitter and Instagram, and Pinterest accounts.

Like with the inbox, just be aware that YouTube and TikTok are missing here.

Analytics

The analytics dashboard is simple and clear. It gives an immediate overview of key metrics for your account. SocialPilot collects analytics automatically when you add a social media account, making it easy to keep track of your metrics from day one.

Reporting

SocialPilot’s reports cover content performance, engagement and more. There’s just one problem: professional plan users can’t download, email, or schedule reports.

If you want a white label report you can brand for your company or agency, you’ll need the Agency plan. However, you can download or email analytics data for each social media profile to share with team members and clients with most of the plans.

Overall, SocialPilot provides plenty of useful data to help with your social media strategy. Learn more about using SocialPilot analytics.

Email Support Is Quick, but Don’t Bother with Social Media

A good starting point for SocialPilot support is the knowledgebase, which you access via the FAQ button in your dashboard. This has dozens of articles with screenshots covering every aspect of the app, and it’s pretty useful.

Contact Form

If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the knowledge base, click on the Contact link in the navigation menu to send a message about your issue. The support team promises to respond within 24 hours, and support is offered 24 hours a day, 5 days a week.

I sent a message asking about adding a Facebook ad account and got a response with a link to a walkthrough in about 40 minutes.

Facebook

SocialPilot does not make commitments to social media support; however, I attempted communication through that channel nonetheless. At 2pm, I forwarded a Facebook message inquiring about team roles. Although the message was viewed, I did not receive a response even after one day. Subsequently, three days later, I received a reply containing a link to a useful article.

Twitter

When I tweeted a question about payment options, I had a similar experience. But this time, there was no response from SocialPilot’s Twitter account at all.

There was no option for live chat in my account, and I didn’t see an option to open a support ticket. Overall, your best bet is to go for email support.

Support Questionnaire

It’s a big advantage that you don’t have to pay extra for social media analytics, and even the Professional account includes 3 team members and 10 social media accounts. SocialPilot accepts all major credit cards, plus PayPal, so it’s easy to pay in the way that suits you best. If you pay annually, there’s a discount on the published price.

There are also discounts for nonprofits, though SocialPilot does not give details on the percentage.

Cancellations & Refunds

SocialPilot allows you to cancel your account at any time and has a prorated refund policy for annual subscriptions. But, if you’re on a monthly subscription and you stand your ground, we’ve found you can cancel AND get your money back. Learn about that experience in this article.