One of the most challenging tasks for social media marketers is having to juggle several platforms all at the same time.
Between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat and all of the other networks that might matter to their audiences, marketers can have a tough time creating, approving, and posting social content – especially if they work in teams.
Enter Unified Inbox, a Singaporean company that aims to solve the problem. It’s built a new Chrome extension called Outbox Pro, which it says will make it faster and simpler for businesses to publish their content to social networks.
Like Hootsuite and Buffer, the focus here is enabling multiple people to get content posted. It gives users the ability to create content, but it also allows team members to edit and approve each other’s work, and either publish it directly or schedule it for publication later. Outbox Pro also gives users the ability to track both original and curated content by multiple authors on social media.
The product is also very similar to Hootsuite in that it allows users to assign roles to different team members, giving members different levels of permission to post content. It also lets its customers assign different administrators, give access to social networks without requiring them to share passwords, and to create customized content for each social platform. If team members see their posts have been declined, they can also edit them and send them again for approval.
So far, Unified Inbox counts the Wyndham Hotel Group in Singapore as one of its clients, meaning it serves hotels like the Days Hotel and Ramada. The hotels currently use Outbox Pro as a customer service tool, helping them create content for their social accounts.
With its new product, Unified Inbox is trying to compete with Hootsuite and Buffer, which largely dominate the space among companies that help users post to multiple social networks at once.
Compared to Hootsuite, Unified Inbox says it has an advantage in that it automatically provides multi-author access, something not available with the free version of Hootsuite. While Hootsuite’s Pro plan and Enterprise plan does allow for multiple authors, the Pro plan starts at $9.99 a month. Buffer also offers a free plan, but its small business plan is $50 a month, its medium business is $100, and a large business would expect to pay $250 monthly.
In contrast, Unified Inbox is giving away a user’s first 100 posts for free, and each post after that costs 25 cents each – so depending on how many posts a company might generate, this might be a cheaper option.
However, Hootsuite does have an advantage over Outbox Pro and Buffer in that it supports Google+. Right now, Outbox Pro only supports Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, though it says it will announce support for more social networks in the future.
Plus, Hootsuite is known for partnering with a slew of other marketing companies, housing more than 100 apps in its App Directory to help marketers with customer service, social media management, and social selling.
Still, with Outbox Pro, Unified Inbox is offering yet another option with a different pricing model – and for social media marketers, it doesn’t hurt to have more choices.
