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PromoRepublic review and guide: Should you get this tool to manage your social media?

Wondering what is PromoRepublic and whether you should pay for it? In my post, I will give you a full review of this social media platform and show how to use it.

I got lifetime access to the PromoRepublic plan “Smart Posting” without Time Slots feature via an AppSumo deal. 

By that time, I had been already using Amplifr for all my websites but one. I ran out of available accounts I could add to Amplifr so I used the AppSumo deal as an opportunity to give PromoRepublic a try.

Eventually, I decided to keep it. Now, I use it to schedule my LivingOffCloud social media posts.

What is PromoRepublic?

PromoRepublic is a social media management platform that allows you to create social media posts using the content pool and ideas provided by the tool, schedule publications, see the stats, monitor your social media brand reputation, and even schedule ads. You can also create and manage your own marketing team.

What makes it different from the rest of social media tools is that it is both a scheduling and design tool. 

It’s like a baby of Amplifr and Canva.

According to their website, PromoRepublic has already helped 15,500+ small businesses and marketers, created and posted 4,500,000+ social media posts that reached 51,000,000+ potential customers.

Speaking of ideas and content. In PromoRepublic, you can find ideas and content for 18 different industries including Home&Interior, Pets, Food&Restaurant, Media, Real Estate, Retail, Technology, etc. 

Promorepublic review: Industries

PromoRepublic review at a glance

Here’s a list of the features PromoRepublic offers:

This is a very impressive list.

Let’s see what PromoRepublic does well and what it does not.

Pros

Cons

Who is PromoRepublic for?

PromoRepublic positions itself as a social media management platform for small businesses as well as for agencies and freelancers who do social media work for clients.

Whether you want to do it yourself or let them do it for you: PromoRepublic got you covered.

If you are a blogger or niche website master who is considering to get PromoRepublic for your blog, it might be worth it in the case you plan to do an extensive social media promotion. If your blog does not have social media or you do not actively work on growing it, this product is probably not for you.

If you have a virtual assistant (VA) who you plan to offload social media work in PromoRepublic, you may need to share the same account with them or to subscribe to a more expensive price tier.

PromoRepublic pricing

PromoRepublic offers two main kinds of pricing plans: For individuals/small businesses and for agencies and freelancers.

Their pricing structure might look a bit confusing since the prices presented on the website do not show all the available tiers of the tool. To see all price tiers, you need to create an account and log in.

Here, I will talk about the prices visible from the account page.

For individuals/small businesses

For small business users or individuals, PromoRepublic offers various plans that give you different features.

The first two plans, Starter Smart Posting and Smart Posting, are basically two tiers of the same plan and offer the same features but with different limitations. The limitations come down to the number of social media accounts you can have and whether you can access time slots (auto-scheduling) and have an extra team member.

The other two plans, Social Monitoring and Intelligent Ads, provide access to two different sets of features. 

On top of that, you can subscribe for the Content Bundle plan to get a personalized visual branding.

PromoRepublic reviews pricing_content_bundle

PromoRepublic also offers Full Service. if you subscribe to it, they will manage your social media for you.

PromoRepublic reviews pricing_full_service

For agencies and freelancers

For this kind of plan, PromoRepublic has a similar price structure.

You can choose between two tiers of the core functionality: Smart Posting and Smart Posting + Collaboration.

The difference between them is in the number of supported social profiles, the number of team members you can have and access to an approval flow for better collaboration. The more expensive plan will also give you advanced reporting and statistics.

In this kind of plan, you can also get the Content Bundle and Full Service for the same price as for individuals.

Another available feature for Agencies is White Label Solution so you can get your own software with personalized logo and domain name. The price is not specified so you would need to contact PromoRepublic.

How to use PromoRepublic

Login

Once you created your account, you need, well, to log in.

If you do it for the first time, PromoRepublic will ask you to add your social media accounts right away.

Manage social media accounts

Once you are in, you can add more social media accounts to your profile via the left panel called Pages that shows up if you are in the Calendar.

There are three ways to do it:

  1. For the most popular social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc), there are separate rows so just click on the Plus button in a row
  2. Click on a plus button right next to Pages 
  3. Via Connect More row at the bottom of the panel

In order to delete an account or a page from an account, just click on it in the left sidebar, then click on the Gear button. Then you see a pop-up where you click on Disconnect page.

PromoRepublic reviews remove_an_account_or_page_2

To select a social media account you would like to work with, just click on it in the Pages sidebar.

Now, let’s take a look at the top menu.

Calendar

The Calendar tab in the top menu opens, well, the calendar.

It has two layouts: Week and Month, and two views: My Content and Upcoming Events. 

In My Content view, you can see all the posts you scheduled to the selected time range for the account you chose in the left panel. This view also allows you to easily create a post for a particular day via a pop-up button that appears when you move your mouse over today or any day in the future.

In the Upcoming Events view, you can see all the special dates and celebrations happening every day. 

You can also see some suggested templates that reflect the events of a day. By clicking on the template image, you can create a new post that will contain the template image.

Note that in this view, you can work only with one social media account at a time. 

It means that if you want to see, let’s say, the posts for both Facebook and Twitter in the same calendar view, it is not possible.

Create a post

You can create a post for a selected social media account in many ways:

  • via the right top button in the top menu
  • in the My Content calendar for a particular day
  • in the Upcoming Events calendar for a particular day either via the Create button or by clicking on one of the events or templates
  • via Time Slots that I will discuss below

Then, you will get a pop-up form in which you can provide the text and image for your post.

If you created the post from a template, the template image will be included and you can edit it (just move your mouse over it) or replace altogether.

You can also choose what social media accounts you would like to post it and choose one or more at the same time. here, you can add more accounts via the Plus button.

You can schedule your post or publish it right away. If you have the Time Slots feature (which I write about below), you will be able to add your post to the queue from here.

PromoRepublic reviews create_post_a_pop_up_form_1

If you choose to schedule the post on a certain day, you will get a new pop-up form with the scheduling parameters.

Repeating posts

Apart from the date and time, you can choose whether you want to repeat your post. It can be repeated daily or weekly and when to stop the repetition.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to repeat a post monthly. 

PromoRepublic reviews create_post_a_pop_up_form_2

The feature works independently from auto-publishing a.k.a. Time Slots. When you use Time Slots to schedule a post, it is not possible to repeat it. 

According to PromoRepublic, this feature is useful for ever-green posts that can and should be recycled to reach its full engagement potential.

Personally, I found it a bit confusing and not flexible enough. Maybe, if you have a big audience, it would be useful. However, if your social media audience is small, you probably do not want to bombard them with the same content over and over. In this case, the inability to do monthly repetitions makes the feature quite useless. 

Time Slots

Time Slots is a feature that allows you to choose the best time for your posts to maximize post engagement and expand your reach on social media.

PromoRepublic developed an AI that analyzes your followers’ engagement based on your industry and the followers’ activity as well as the most optimal time when the content of a particular type would perform the best.

Right, Time Slots work per the content type. Time slots available for your posts are divided into categories based on the content nature:

  • Promotional
  • Engaging
  • Educational
  • Motivational&Fun
  • Article

If your plan includes the Time Slots feature, your Calendar will have blue buttons with colorful tags attached to them. These are the recommended slots for particular types of content.

There are multiple ways to create the time slots:

By default, the Autopilot feature is active for all social media accounts you connected. 

In order to access its setting or deactivate it, click on the Gear icon next to your account in the left sidebar. You will get a pop-up with the Autopilot settings. 

By default, all the days are active. You can turn off any days or switch to the manual queue altogether. To switch to the manual queue, simply click on Edit Content Plan and this will turn off the Autopilot.

One of the cons of Autopilot is that there are only two slots available, one in the morning and another one in the afternoon. This might be enough for Facebook publishing but definitely not enough for Twitter or Pinterest.

For the manual mode, you can add or delete slots for each content type. And of course, you can switch back to the Autopilot mode at any time.

Post ideas

If you’ve ever struggled with churning out new original posts daily, you will definitely appreciate this Post Ideas feature of PromoRepublic.

On this tab, you first need to choose your industry (remember we talked in the beginning about 18 industries supported by PromoRepublic?)

Then, you can see various content relevant to your industry. The content comes in two forms: Templates and articles. 

Templates allow you to create a media post with an image.

Meanwhile, Articles are actual posts published on popular websites and relevant to your industry. PromoRepublic syndicates and curates these articles from the relevant web sources. Once you choose an article to publish, your post body gets pre-populated with the article title and shortened link so you can do the publishing with literally only two clicks.

Templates come in various formats for different social media: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc and with different topics such as Quotes, Greetings, Motivation, and so on.

PromoRepublic reviews post_ideas_overview

The content you see is also relevant to the time of the year when you are creating a post. 

For example, I was writing this post at the beginning of February and PromoRepublic was showing me the content about St-Valentine’s Day.

Graphics editor

One of the best features of PromoRepublic is that it has a built-in graphics editor. You can access it in the top menu called “Editor”.

Also, it is available in the create post form if you move the mouse over the image you added to your post.

All it creates a nice seamless experience and save some time when creating social media content.

The editor is very easy to use. You can choose the dimensions you want your image to have. It can be the preset dimensions for the social media you are making a post for or custom dimensions.

On the left, you have access to a big library of templates, background images, and various graphics such as shapes, buttons, etc.

You can upload your own images and save your creations into My ideas library.

PromoRepublic_reviews_graphi_editor_overview_objects

Statistics

In the Statistics tab, you can see some basic analytics for your social media accounts.

Each social media network has different parameters. You can sort based on these parameters as well as see some overall numbers about how many posts you have published and how popular they are.

For example, here’s how Facebook stats look like:

The native analytics of each platform shows much more data than PromoRepublic is able to pull. However, PromoRepublic shows you also the performance of the posts that were scheduled outside of it. It means you can post manually and still see the stats in PeromoRepublic. 

And you can repost the best performing posts right from the Statistics dashboard.

Monitoring

The Social Monitoring feature is active only if you got a namesake plan to your account. 

It allows you to see mentions of your brand over social media. You can see in one place if your posts had comments and reply to them (resolve). Or, whether the brand was mentioned in some other threads. This is basically a CRM tool for social media.

This is how it works in the nutshell:

Ads

The Ads feature is active only if you added a namesake plan to your account. 

It allows you to “run ad campaigns to target people who are more likely to take certain actions on Social Media”. 

I did not try this feature and for more info, you should contact PromoRepublic directly.

Instagram publishing

PromoRepubli allows you to post on Instagram via their mobile app PromoRepublic Notifier

The big disadvantage of the app is that it is exclusively for Instagram publishing and does not have any other functionality. You still need to create Instagram posts in the web app. 

The app has quite a low rating, at least on the Android platform. Users complain the app does not always notify about an upcoming Instagram posting and does not have any other features.

PromoRepublic reviews mobile_app_android_rating

Integrations

PromoRepublic supports integrations with:

As of the integration with Buffer, it seems that it has been removed and is no longer supported.

Why would you need these integrations if you already have a scheduling feature in promoRepublic?

Well, it’s because you may already your own social media posting system in place but you still want to benefit from the graphics editor and content ideas PromoRepublic offers. In this case, the integrations come in handy.

How’s PromoRepublic compare with other apps?

Of course, PromoRepublic is not the only platform that offers social media publishing and graphic media editors. 

Let’s see how it compares with the other popular tools.

Buffer, Hootsuite, and Apmlifr

Buffer, Hootsuite and Amplifr also allow you to schedule your content, publish it based on the user engagement, and see the statistics.

Let’s see how PromoRepublich stands against these apps.

Scheduling

Buffer and Hootsuite present the publishing queue in a form of, well, queue. or pipeline. 

Meanwhile, PromoRepublic does it in the way Amplifr does it, in a form of a calendar. You can see right away which days have no posts and which ones do. For me, this kind of presentation is much more convenient since it is more visual and I can see right away what days miss posts.

The auto-scheduling feature of PromoRepublic is a bit rigid compared to its rivals. It offers 1 to 2 fixed time slots per day. Maximum of 2 slots per day may be enough for Facebook publishing but definitely not enough for Twitter let alone Pinterest.

The problem with fixed time slots is that if you schedule too far away in the future, the best time may change by the time your post gets published and you will miss the most engaged time.

Meanwhile, Amplifr offers 3 best time slots, also fixed. Buffer offers from 2 to 4 fixed time slots, and the number depends on the social network (four for Twitter and Pinterest). Hootsuite takes the prize in auto posting since it does not have fixed time slots and tweaks the time based on how your audience responds.

Statistics

Buffer, Hootsuite, and Amplifr also have stats but you only get to see how the posts you scheduled from the platform performed. They don’t show the stats for the posts scheduled manually.

Meanwhile, PromoRepublic, as I mentioned before, shows the analysis of all the posts you published whether you did it via the platform or not. This gives you a possibility to watch your manual publications as well and repost them if needed.

Canva and Stencil

Now, let’s compare the graphics editor of PromoRepublic with Canva and Stencil.

Stencil is a tool that allows you to quickly wipe up a media and post it right away.

Their strength is speed and here, PromoRepublic may lose a couple of points. You cannot save your favorite custom media dimensions while Stencil does (very convenient!). Also, PromoRepublic does not allow to organize your content in folders so if you have a lot of media, you may spend some time looking for the exact images you need.

However, this is probably the only part where Stencil is better. For the rest: Editing, tools, available templates – PromoRepublic is far more superior.

Canva seems to be a more convenient graphic editor oriented towards a more professional audience. What PromoRepublic does not have but Canva does is element groups, folders, an ability to create teams, and so on. Canva also allows you to connect various apps and extensions for extra functionality.

However, one feature that I find quite annoying in Canva is that it upsells you with extra content. PromoRepublic does not do it.

PromoRepublic reviews graphi_editor

More from PromoRepublic

Apart from all rich feature app PromoRepublic offers, they genuinely want you to succeed with your social media efforts and help you to grow your social media brand.

Every Tuesday, they offer free webinars.

You can sign up and attend it live to ask questions and discuss your topics not only with the webinar organizers but also with the community that attends the webinars. You can also re-watch past webinars on their YouTube channel.

Here’s one of the webinars:

PromoRepublic also has a Facebook group. In the group, you will receive free access to live videos, webinar recordings, expert pieces of advice, exclusive ebook, and reports.

If it’s still not enough for you, check out their social media course! Sign up for it to master:

  • How to set up your social media profiles
  • How to grow your follower numbers
  • How to come up with a social media strategy specific per channel
  • How to re-enforce branding and design
  • Mastering Facebook ads

PromoRepublic review in a nutshell

It does not look like today, there is no alternative to PromoRepublic on the market.

There are tools out there that either do social media publishing or are graphics editors. However, none of them merges both functions together as PromoRepublic does.

If you are a blogger or niche website master who needs to manage and grow their social media, this tool might be for you.

PromoRepublic allows you to create new media based on a vast pool of ready-to-use content and publish it on your social channels either manually or via auto-posting. 

You can see how your posts perform and repost the ones that do well. You can also monitor your brand reputation directly from the app and manage your social media ads right there as well. Not mentioning creating and managing your marketing team!

Apart from that, PromoRepublic heavily invests in educating their users in the craft of social media marketing via free weekly webinars, Facebook group, and a marketing course.

Sounds great? use my affiliate link and sign up for your PromoRepublic account right here! After all, they offer a 14-day trial so you can investigate all their features before committing to paying your money.

Am I keeping it?

In the end, I decided to keep it.

What I liked the best was how easy it is to create new content for my social media and schedule it right away. I regret I did not buy Time Slots (in the AppSumo deal, it came as a separate package) but even as is, PromoRepublic saves my precious time.

How do you manage your social media marketing?

Disclaimer: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I will receive a small fee if you choose to buy after clicking on any of these links. Thank you if you do! šŸ¤—

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