ContentCal is Shutting Down: SocioLocal is the Best Alternative for Multi-Location Brands!

ContentCal is shutting down! As of 31st March 2023, the company has announced that it will be discontinuing its service and users will no longer have access to the platform.

While it's always sad to see a valued tool for so many businesses disappear, this gives companies the opportunity to reassess what the right tool is for them. When it comes to multi-location brands, at SocioLocal we believe we have the best alternative, designed specifically for your needs.

Since launching in 2014, ContentCal was a SaaS product that made it easy for users to create, schedule, publish, and analyze their posts on social media. Now that it is closing down, it is time to take this opportunity to rethink your social media strategy for your multi-location brand. It is time to ask yourself some valuable questions; 

• Have you been posting to all of your local social media pages? If not, why not?
• Have you been maximising the reach of your brand to your local audiences? 
• Have you been wasting time utilising tools that have not been created specifically for multi-location businesses? 
• Have you been optimising customer sentiment for all of your locations? Do you have visibility of customer sentiment? 
  

If you are a multi-location brand or franchise and have been using ContentCal to schedule content on your social media channels, you will be feeling the loss. However, switching to a tool that is designed specifically for your needs will be a gain! (see our recent article on how to calculate the commercial gain) It’s time to turn that frown upside down. SocioLocal’s multi-location tool, SocioCommand, can answer all of your needs and more. SocioCommand is a tool specifically designed for multi-location brands, making it easy for you to publish and schedule content for thousands of locations, analyze reputation, advertise and monitor results. 

Read on if you would like to know more about what features SocioCommand prioritises for multi-location brands and why we think Inbox, Analytics and Reporting are necessary for social media to perform well today!

What SocioCommand Prioritises for Multi-Location Businesses 

Publishing to multiple social media pages in one click!

‍ContentCal made it easy to publish brand posts to just one brand page and to see this in a weekly calendar format hour by hour, every day. Now, let’s take that one step further and introduce all of your multiple locations into this calendar. SocioCommand allows you to create ‘Batch Posts’ to multiple locations at the same time in just one click and schedule it to a date and time of your choosing. You can create different groups in SocioCommand based on branded promotions, seasonal promotions or regional content. This hyperlocal content will be displayed in a weekly calendar format so that you can see what is being scheduled across your estate; hour by hour, every single day of the week. Publishing at scale made easy!

Advertising at scale

‍An added feature that ContentCal did not have - Advertising! In today’s social media world, posts rarely get seen without a little bit of spend behind them. So this is a feature that we prioritised massively at SocioLocal.
With our Advertising module, you will be able to run social media ads at a local level at scale. No more creating ads per store, those days are gone! Put local ads live in local areas with local-level intelligence, track performance and ad spend within SocioCommand and optimise to ensure your budget is used efficiently. This feature is particularly important for multi-location brands or franchises because making an ad directly on social media channels for multiple pages can be a long and tiresome task - not to mention repetitive and boring! Cut out all of the hard work and boost the reach of your brand with this extremely rewarding time saver! 

Track Sentiment Across your Estate with Socio Inbox

‍ContentCal allowed you to keep track of incoming comments, messages and mentions for your brand on their feature called ‘Engagement’. Connecting with your customers through your social media pages and responding to reviews on all platforms helps you to grow your customer relationships outside of your four walls. Reputation management provides you with a chance to counter negative feedback. It also creates an opportunity to promote the experience of your positive mentions by responding positively.  But why just do it for your brand page? Customer sentiment reaches out to all corners of your brand - from the big-city locations to rural locations with lots of loyal customer advocates.

Our Socio Inbox module enables you to manage all your reviews, comments and direct messages from every one of your locations on Facebook, Instagram and Google, in one place. What a great way to improve customer sentiment and efficiency across your business! If you need help claiming some of your local businesses on Google, check out our blog on How to Claim Multi-Location Listings on Google. An effective online reputation management strategy can increase brand awareness and give you insight into issues your customers may be encountering.

‍Analytics & Reporting + - ÷ √‍

ContentCal was a big fan of detailed deep-dive reports for your brand page - and so are we (but for every single one of your locations too!)
If there’s one thing we all know when it comes to social media marketing, analytics are directly tied to the success of your marketing efforts and your business as a whole. Brands need analytics to improve strategies on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. 

Within Performance, you have a dashboard as shown below. You have non-social media metrics ranging from your website visitor traffic, your website conversion (if you have a shop or online order system) and the number of people who called your business by searching for your phone number online across your estate.  For social media metrics, you have everything from the number of posts, post reach, and the number of likes through to the performance of posts with ad spend and without and how they compare. We culminate all of these top-level metrics across your estate at the top of our dashboard and then break it down per location page, per location network and per post.
We have also made it easy to analyze these results with downloadable reporting options! 

We also offer a premium feature with advanced insights for Multi-Location Brands called Business Intelligence - it aggregates and displays data from 1000's of locations in an accessible and easy to understand way. Extract deep business value at both an estate level and individual location level to power the decisions you make.
If you would like to read more about our top analytics features, check out our blog The 5 Key Features of Analytics here. Because really, we could go on about it for hours! (Sorry, not sorry 😉)

More features we haven’t even discussed yet…

• Content Pool - Simple storage and filing across your business. Store, tag, and categorise all your brand files and give access to specific promotions to each of your locations on mobile or desktop. 
• SocioLocal for local users - a product specifically designed for local retailers to help save time & increase revenue and manage customer interactions from one place

What happens next? 

Well, if you are working for a multi-location brand and currently using ContentCal, they have recently published a handy article with tips on how to download reports and content on your account before it shuts down. You then need to decide on a replacement tool for your specific social media marketing needs. Forget replacing ContentCal with a tool that just prioritises singular brand pages - think bigger!

ContentCal was designed for creators and small businesses to edit photos and/or share them on social media sites. SocioCommand is a tool specifically designed for multi-location brands, making it easy for them to publish and schedule content for thousands of locations, analyze reputation, advertise and monitor results.

If SocioCommand sounds like something that you need for your business, book a demo and we would be happy to bring you through all of the amazing features we haven’t discussed above.