We have been using Hootsuite as a marketing tool and social media management software for some time now and are happy with it. However, as our digital marketing services grew beyond the boundaries Asian countries, we had to explore more and more social media tools to meet the expectations of a wide range of clients we had.
Of course, Hootsuite is a great tool and it works perfectly for most of our clients but there were occasions some of our clients asked for something different. Also, I wanted to suggest some basic social media management tools to our digital marketing trainees, interns and workshop attendees. One of the interesting tools I recently came across was “Woop”.
So, what is “Woop”?
In simple terms, Woop is a social media scheduler and analytics tool. Using Woops, you can schedule posts for all of your supported social media channels.
As of today, Woop supports the following social media platforms:
1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. Twitter
4. LinkedIn
As an international digital marketing agency, SpiderWorks supports social media platforms beyond these and helps our clients build customer engagement through various other channels and platforms. However, a good number of our small clients limits their major social engagements to these 4 common social media channels and so, this limitation of Woop is not a constraint for them.
Woop offers a “Freemium” plan and 3 paid plans (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced). Also, there is a custom plan which allows you to customise the license according to your specific requirements.
The primary difference between all these plans are in the number of social channels you can manage through these, except the Freemium plan doesn’t allow you to access Advanced Analytics Reports beyond a limit of 10 days.
The Freemium plan will work perfectly if you are looking for managing a single client or your own single business. It supports managing one of each social media channel. If you like to manage more than one channel in any platform, then you may need to upgrade to a premium plan.
A detailed comparison of the features is available here – https://woopsocial.com/plans
There is no complex sign up process. Just click on the “Create Account” button and provide your basic details.
And once you sign up providing the basic details, here comes the WOOP welcome screen.
NOTE:
1. Even though Woop is a great social media integration platform, they don’t support signing up using any social media accounts like Facebook! Hope they will soon implement a Facebook sign up option.
2. If you read their “terms of use” before you sign up, you may find many questionable terms like “the Service is solely for User’s personal use”. I decided to ignore such terms since most of those are made by the lawyers and people rarely pay attention to those in the internet world.
Is it safe to share your social media credentials with Woop?
I added this section to this review of Woop since one of my readers asked this question recently. Well, in my opinion, you should never share your credentials with anyone else. But in the case, Woop will not ask your social media user id or password. Instead, Woop is using the authentication system provided by Facebook and other social media platforms. So, you just need to connect your social media channels by following the authentication system provided by those social platforms and you are not providing the credentials to Woop.
Now, once you sign up for the account, it is time to try your first post using Woop.
Their scheduler interface is pretty simple and straightforward. Move your mouse towards the bar on the left side and the navigation bar will automatically expand. Click on the “New Post” link and you will see a simple interface to prepare your post.
Select the pre-configured channels to post and type your content. Attach images to go with your post. Also, schedule a time for the post. If you like to post it right away, just uncheck the “Schedule” option and you will see the “Send Now” button enabled.
There is a nice preview panel on the right bar, which shows how your post is going to look like when posted on social channels.
Woop is a simple, and an easy to use platform. However, I found that the tool is still evolving and require some tuning. I found the following issues with Woop:
1. The scheduler doesn’t use our current time zone. Instead, we have to choose a timezone, relative to GMT time. If you don’t know your GMT relative time, you may find it difficult to pick a time.
2. The GMT time picker doesn’t allow a precision less than 1 Hour. Indian Standard Time is GMT +5:30, but I had to choose either +5;00 or +6:00.
If they can allow the scheduling of posts based on the current time zone set in the profile of the user, it would become much easier to use Woop Social Media Scheduler.
As a professional blogger, reviewer and digital marketing expert, I may have over-tested the tool and most users may not encounter such issues, but as a professional reviewer, I would like to share what I experienced.
I shouldn’t stop this review without telling what is best about Woop Social Media Tool.
1. Woop is a very simple tool to manage and schedule posts on social media channels. Even a novice user can easily pick up how things work with it and start using it right away.
2. It is absolutely free for the basic purpose. If you want to manage your personal or business channels, you can use Woop free of cost. You can connect one channel from each of the supported social media channels to your Woop account.