Crowdfire
Crowdfire strongly focuses on its core social management function, with a strong emphasis on scheduling content across your social channels at the most suitable times. It adds social listening and competitor analysis at its higher subscription levels.
One of its greatest strengths is the easy way you can use it to post a wide range of content across all of your social channels. It also claims to be the first social media management app that supports posting to TikTok, which could be particularly useful to brands targeting a youthful audience.
You can use Crowdfire to post to virtually every social major social network, as well as sharing your material from a surprisingly large selection of blogging platforms, online shops, and video sites (YouTube and Twitch). It does this using a clean interface, making it straightforward to send a single post to all your selected social networks, yet customize your message for each account.
Crowdfire puts content curation at its fore (indeed, that is the first item in the top menu). You can select content to share from a series of articles, images, posts (yours, including YouTube videos), and RSS feeds. It recommends articles to you, and you can easily customize and refine the topics on which Crowdfire offers you content.
The free version of Crowdfire is quite limited, but it does give you a chance to test Crowdfire’s core capabilities. If you wish to use it in any real regular capacity, you will have to buy a paid plan, although the plans are reasonably priced compared to much of the competition.
Although you don’t get to see more advanced features like social listening and competitor analysis with the free or Plus plans, you do get offered a 14-day free trial of them, so you can decide whether you will have enough use to warrant the extra cost.
Pricing
As a SaSS platform, access to Crowdfire is sold on a monthly or annual basis. There are discounts for annual payments. Crowdfire offers a limited free plan and three paid plans.
Free – 4 social accounts (1 each of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram), 10 scheduled posts per social account, article curation, image curation, multiple image posts, social and advanced analytics (1 day’s data), ad-supported
Plus, $9.99/mo – 10 social accounts, 100 scheduled posts per social account, connect 5 RSS feeds, custom posting schedule, multiple image posts, video posts, social and advanced analytics (30 days data), and post analytics
Premium, $49.99/mo – 25 social accounts, 100 scheduled posts per social account, connect 15 RSS feeds, custom posting schedule, multiple image posts, video posts, basic, advanced, and post analytics, competitor analysis (2 competitors per social account), monitor and reply to mentions, schedule with calendar view, bulk schedule, can add & manage one profile and team member
VIP, $99.99/mo – 250 social accounts, 800 scheduled posts per social account, connect 25 RSS feeds, custom posting schedule, multiple image posts, video posts, basic, advanced, and post analytics, competitor analysis (20 competitors per social account), monitor and reply to mentions, schedule with calendar view, bulk schedule, can add & manage two profiles and team members (and add further at $25/ additional profile or team member)
The Details
Crowdfire has evolved from a product called JustUnfollow. At that stage, the primary purpose was to assist you in following and unfollowing Twitter followers in bulk easily. At that time, there were a few other similar products available, like ManageFlitter. In 2018, Twitter cracked down on the industry, removing access to its API to most of these apps.
This meant JustUnfollow, like its competitors, had to change direction or die. They chose to become Crowdfollow and expand on their product’s social media management capabilities. They also widened their coverage from just Twitter. The result is that although the product doesn’t pretend to have such a wide-ranging set of features as some of the competition (that have always had their focus on being social sales and marketing platforms), it does its core features well.
As with most social media marketing apps, you begin by signing in. You can use your social accounts to help simplify this process.
I was impressed by Crowdfire’s clean, easy-to-use interface. With one notable exception, everything seemed intuitive and clear, and it was certainly easy to use. The one area of concern comes once you time-out and have to log back in. They certainly make their reminders clear, but it is not at all evident as to how to log back in.
Crowdfire handles content particularly well. I very much liked the way you can connect virtually all of your content channels – websites, blogs, online stores, YouTube channels, Twitch streams, and more. Crowdfire continually looks for new content on these content channels and tries to draft posts, adapted to be suitable for each of your social channels.
I can imagine that it will be particularly handy for the organized social marketer. You can set your optimal posting times for each of your social networks, and then keep adding content, ready for Crowdfire to distribute posts across your selected times. And then, of course, you can intermingle your organization's content, with other curated content, both posts, and images.
Crowdfire also handles the newer social networks well. It may have grown out of a Twitter app, but it has widened to cater to new platforms such as TikTok. It also recognizes the inherent importance of images nowadays, with Instagram and Pinterest clearly provided for – far more than just an after-thoughts as they appear in some other apps.
While Crowdfirs lacks some of the detail of larger apps, such as Sprout Social or Agora Pulse, it covers a narrower feature set, where it performs well.