We decided to review a software trial, SendPilot as we were considering buying the lifetime deal at SocialStack. [Updates 13 March 2020: The $49-lifetime deal was sold out and now charged at $500-lifetime or $24-monthly]
Our verdict? Promising but not yet and not suitable for us. If you are like us and don't rely on email marketing or have high bounce rates, don't try as you will get rate-limited unless ... you hit average deliverability.
We understand they want to block bad actors from causing the host from getting blocked by Gmail so avoid unless you know email marketing.
SendPilot.co
Pros
- Support 8 languages? (but we only tried English)
- It can pull images from your post
- It can pull from your blog directly?
- Owner video at start garners a bit of trust
- UI is simple enough
- White-label option for an agency? (didn't try)
- Intelligent hashtag (it just choose some #Monday since we tried on Monday. Not sure if there are more intelligence)
Cons
- The schedule is not smart enough as it does take into account the current post schedule. It just takes content and defaults the schedule.
- The pulling from your blog has potential (RSS Feed Monitor) but it took longer than expected (we waited an hour) so we didn't explore it
- The Discovery module didn't work for us. There were search results but we cannot add to Campaign (maybe not designed for Chrome)
- AI is overrated and it just randomizes the text without any context from your post
- It pulls images but if there are less than 3, it will use its own stock photos by default (I would prefer if it loops through your own for more relevance)
Before closing our final thoughts, we would like to share what is an ideal social management app aka wishlist for us. We like writing content but we don't really value social media as its traffic just dived with information overload. We also don't explore social media application usually. Nevertheless, below is a wishlist besides a one-time fee only (or even better free).
- Automate pulling relevant content from our blogs (example, it will pull relevant headline/sentences from our blog and put in the social post)
- Automate post based on the current schedule (without us even deciding since posting more is better than less)
- Do A/B testing itself (based on our goal, much like FB Ads, e.g. shares/likes/clicks) and improves and surprises us with its findings (#trueAI)
The above wishlist is not meant to be possible and just what we hope. You can see that automation is key in social media as it is really time-consuming and usually not worth doing it manually (unless you can get an intern who doesn't mind to do it cheaply for experience)
We really wanted to get SendPilot if it could automate our social media campaign from our content blogs but guess it wasn't what we expected. There are potential but we won't get it given the little value at the current stage. I look forward to the next iteration as we don't think this is the last we will see of SendPilot.
Weirdly the domain was only registered in Feb 2018 and we saw an older link selling lifetime deal at PitchGround. Nevertheless, we didn't dig further as the functionalities weren't useful for us.
https://pitchground.com/sendpilot
There were backlinks from Buffer so we guess Buffer trust them at least, for using their API. We will continue to review apps as social media seem like a world for automated processes, compared to blogging which needs careful keyword researches and less forgiving on mistakes and irrelevance.