eClincher Review 2024 – Is It Underrated?

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Is eClincher a Hootsuite Beater?

California-based eClincher is less well-known than powerhouses like Hootsuite or Buffer, but it still has plenty of fans. It’s been around for quite a few years, and is growing in popularity. In fact, many eClincher reviews compare it favorably to some of these better-known social media monitoring tools.

Aimed at business and agency users, this social media dashboard supports Facebook (profiles, pages, and ads), Instagram (personal and business), LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google My Business, Google Analytics, Blogger, and RSS feeds.

While the Basic version of eClincher supports ten social media profiles and a single user, this increases with other plans. The Premier plan lets up to three users manage 20 profiles, and the Agency plan lets up to six users manage 40 profiles.

Our eClincher review will look at the Basic plan, so you’ll soon see if this social media management tool is right for your business or agency. And all eClincher plans include a 14-day free trial, so you can easily check out the whole range of features.

A Full Range of Business Social Media Tools

As you’d expect, eClincher includes a range of social media tools to help businesses get more from their social media presence.

There are a few useful extras, too. For example, those on the Premier and Agency plans can benefit from a built-in media library to make it easy to store and access images for social media sharing.

There’s also a Zendesk integration for managing customers and competitive intelligence reports for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These help you assess how competitors are doing so you can tweak your strategy if necessary. Plus, there are integrations with Feedly, Sniply, Yelp, Google Drive, and Pocket.

Of course, all the extras won’t matter unless eClincher does a good job of the basics, which is what our eClincher review will look at next.

Social Inbox and Engagement

When you use eClincher, it’s easy to keep tabs on incoming messages via the unified inbox. This shows you incoming messages from all social media accounts.

You can respond to messages from within eClincher, as well as handle all interactions (liking, retweeting, mentioning, and so on). This means social media managers can save time by managing all social accounts from a single dashboard.

There are also some neat filtering tools so you can view messages by type or social account. This allows you to focus on what’s most important to you.

Social Listening

As well as monitoring your own social media streams, eClincher lets you keep tabs on topics of interest. It works as a social media tracker, letting you track keywords, hashtags, mentions, company names, and so on.

This helps you stay on top of news in your niche, so you can fill your social streams with relevant, up-to-date content. And it’s also useful to help you analyze what competitors are doing and see how people feel about your brand.

To set this up, go to Feeds – Monitoring Keywords & Hashtag Feeds. Pick the social media account you want to use, then follow the on-screen prompts to customize your monitor.

You can preview the feed to see if it’s right before saving it. Repeat as needed, setting up as many keyword monitors and hashtag trackers as you’d like.

Publishing and Scheduling Posts

With eClincher, you can create social media posts for all your accounts at once. Write your post, or add a link, and you’ll get an instant preview of how it will look on each social media site.

A useful feature is that, if you plan to tag a user, you can start to type their username, and eClincher will generate suggested mentions.

There’s a URL shortener built into eClincher, but you can also use its Bitly integration if you prefer. Depending on the content of your post, eClincher may also suggest relevant hashtags to include, saving you the time of looking these up yourself.

Once you’re happy with your post, you can choose to either post it immediately or schedule it for later. The scheduling tool has a useful feature that lets you schedule your content to appear multiple times over a day, week, or month.

These appear in the schedule area below your post and then you click Done to add the post to your calendar. The calendar view shows you where you have content scheduled, and how many posts are scheduled each day.

RSS Automation

Need to make sure your own blog content is pulled in automatically? eClincher has you covered with its RSS automation tool. Just add a website or feed, and you’ll see a snapshot of the latest content. You can schedule any item, or add it to a queue for automatic publishing. Check out the Ease of Use section for more on automated queues.

This is an excellent feature, which you can also use to populate your social streams with content from trusted sources. However, it didn’t work seamlessly, and failed to pull in content from some popular sites.

Suggested Content

Here’s another useful feature for social media managers looking to find more content for their social streams: the Suggested Content Feed. You just type in a search topic, filter by location, relevance, date, and video content, and find relevant and popular content fast.

Then you can schedule it or add it to a queue as needed. As a bonus, you can also see how many influencers have shared the content.

Team Features

If you’re running a social media team, you can easily assign roles within the eClincher dashboard. Team members have their own logins, and will only be able to work on assigned social media accounts or brands.

There’s also an approval workflow built in, and there’s a role (approver) for those who need to see and comment on posts but don’t need access to the eClincher app.

eClincher Setup Is Easy, and the User Interface Is Simple

Like many other social media management tools, eClincher is easy to set up. Just enter your name, email address, and password, and you’ll have your account within seconds.

But how easy is it to add social media accounts, set a social media posting schedule, and handle other key social media tasks? Let’s take a look.

Adding Social Media Accounts

As soon as you register, you get the option to add social media accounts. On-screen help also pops up. Though this makes the screen a bit busy, it’s useful if you have any issues getting started.

Mostly likely, though, you won’t need help, as adding social media sites is simple. Just click the icon, authorize the eClincher app, and you’re well on your way to using it as a tweet scheduler, Facebook scheduler, Instagram scheduler, or Pinterest scheduler.

Weirdly, though, even after adding social profiles to eClincher, you have to select them with a checkbox before you have the option to post to them. This is very different from most other social media scheduling tools, and seems like an unnecessary extra step.

Navigating the User Dashboard

Once your account is set up, you’re taken to the publishing interface. This is simple to understand. The social accounts you’ve added are over to the left, so you can switch between them easily.

There’s a section in the middle for creating posts and previewing them. Over to the right, you can see your calendar, with any previously scheduled content. You can easily switch between weekly and monthly calendar views, or see post previews in the visual calendar.

Setting a Social Media Posting Schedule

If you intend to use eClincher as a social media post planner, it’s not quite as intuitive as other tools. Unlike Sprout Social, which automatically sets a schedule for you, there wasn’t an easy way to find out how to set up publishing slots in advance.

That said, eClincher has a feature called “autopost with queues.” That’s where you can set up publishing slots and have content post automatically.

The default selection is the Recycle Queue. This indicates that the queue will repeatedly post the content until you deactivate it. This feature offers businesses and agencies an excellent opportunity to distribute evergreen content consistently across the year.

A Well-Rounded Analytics Tool

The default eClincher social media analytics dashboard is pretty plain. But dig a little deeper, and it’s got some great analytics and reporting features.

So, how does it stack up against other social media measurement tools? Pretty well.

Analytics

eClincher provides analytics on:

• Facebook pages and posts
• Twitter profiles and posts
• Instagram Business profiles and posts
• LinkedIn company pages and posts
• And much more

As well as analytics on fans and followers, there’s information on engagement and top content for the different social media platforms. This gives a useful snapshot of how your social media strategy is working.

Reporting

It’s easy to create a report on eClincher. As well as reports on the individual social media platforms, there’s a useful cross-channel report. You can also customize reports by adding your logo, and export them as PDFs with one click.

Apps & Integrations

To get more from eClincher reports, you can link your Google Analytics account to the app. This will let you see analytics data in the same dashboard. It can also give you more insight into the relationship between your social media posts and web traffic.

Speedy Support Via Live Chat

eClincher offers round-the-clock live chat support. Within the app, you can also access a knowledgebase with more than 40 articles. There are also video tutorials covering some of the main features.

Here’s what happened when I tried getting support from eClincher.

Live Chat

When it comes to support, eClincher promotes its live chat solution and promises to respond within five minutes. I asked a question about setting up the social media calendar.

It took no time at all for them to get back to me. I got an answer and a related link. However, the link didn’t fully help solve the issue.

My second interaction with the support team on live chat was even better. This time, I got a response in about two minutes, with helpful links and videos, and the team member was very pleasant.

Facebook

Even though eClincher steers you toward live chat support, I thought I’d try Facebook Messenger anyway.

I asked a related question about the autoposting functionality. Immediately, I got an automated response suggesting I use live chat. A day later, there was still no response from a human. However, since eClincher does not offer Facebook support, it would be unfair to include this in the assessment.

Support Questionnaire

eClincher’s Not Cheap, But Offers Value

Compared with tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, both of which offer free plans, eClincher pricing may seem a bit high. But where Buffer has limits on the number of social media posts you can schedule, all eClincher plans include unlimited scheduling.

The price of eClincher also compares well with other business social media tools, like Sprout Social. But it can get pricey fast, as you can add on social media accounts or users, plus Twitter monitoring and influencer marketing services for additional fees.

You can pay for your eClincher account via Visa, Mastercard, Discover, American Express, and PayPal. There’s also a 15% discount for verified nonprofits.

Small business owners will find that the Basic plan offers plenty of functionality. However, you’ll have to upgrade to the Premier or Agency plan to benefit from unlimited RSS autoposting, competitive intelligence reporting, team tools, and customer service integrations. Agencies will need the Agency plan in order to manage unlimited brands.

Cancellations & Refunds

Since eClincher includes a 14-day free trial on all plans, you can easily cancel your trial without any penalty from the Account Settings area. And if you’re paying monthly, it’s easy to cancel at any time, and retain access to your account till the end of the billing period.

It’s worth noting that eClincher has a no-refund policy. Despite that, our reviewer was able to get a full refund. Read about her eClincher cancellation experience.