It caters for businesses of all sizes – from small businesses to agencies and freelancers, to franchisors and multi-locational brands. You can use it to schedule and share posts with all the major social networks, including importantly for such a visual app, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can set a posting schedule for different types of posts. PromoRepublic suggests a suitable posting schedule for each of your social networks, but you can easily modify this to however you want your posting to go. You can select a country and time zone for each social account, which is particularly useful for agencies and freelancers who operate social accounts on behalf of others. You can organize your posting schedules across a centralized calendar. The calendar is quite flexible. You can show your content (both past and planned) and modify your display (weekly, monthly, or a specific day) to customize it how you desire. You can also display a calendar of upcoming events. It is surprising how many designated days there are in a year. I am writing this on World Population Day. Tomorrow is both Paper Bag Day and Eat Your Jello Day (along with 18 other “days.”) While most of these days may seem fun, even silly, they give you ideas for posts you can create in recognition. Indeed, post Ideas is right at the heart of Promo Republic. It advertises that it comes with 100,000 post ideas, and these cover a wide range of topics. Most of these post ideas come pre-designed, with eye-catching graphics. And because PromoRepublic includes a full graphics editor you can easily modify and customize their post ideas to suit your business. When you click on the Post Ideas page you see content relating to upcoming events, content recommended to you, animated content, articles, quotes, contests, and much more, including quite a few designed for specific social networks. It even suggests possible Facebook covers and Facebook Ads. Another useful feature of the inbuilt graphics editor is that you can select the appropriate dimension of what you want to create with a single click, whether it be a Facebook post, Facebook ad, Facebook cover, Twitter post, Instagram post, Instagram Story, LinkedIn post, Pinterest Graphic, Shopify post, or merely a simple square graphic. If you don’t want to follow a recommended size, you can select your graphic dimensions by simply typing on the size you desire. Not everybody has the time and skill to design emotionally appealing social posts, even with an intelligent editor as there is here. PromoRepublic offers a design service, where you can buy 20 custom templates for your business. Of course, you’re going to want to know how successful your posts have been. You can discover the success of each of your posts and easily repost your most successful ones. One particularly useful feature for larger businesses, agencies, and freelancers running multiple social accounts is that you can separate your content across different workspaces. You can also set up flows that make it easy to work with a team, incorporating any approvals where necessary. PromoRepublic is currently trialing brand reputation management. You can request beta access, so you can get live updates about your brand from the web and social media. You can collect every comment or mention online in real time and react immediately.
PromoRepublic:
Pricing
As a SaaS platform, access to PromoRepublic is sold on a monthly basis. PromoRepublic offers three paid plans after a 14-day trial of the Starter Package (content calendar, graphics editor, and access to thousands of templates). The figures given below assume monthly payment. You receive a discount of 25% for annual payment.
Small business, $59/mo – 10 social profiles, 1 team member, 100,000+ post ideas library, graphics editor, smart posting, time slots, basic post statistics, separate workspaces for each client Agency, $99/mo – 30 social profiles, 10 team members/clients, graphics editor, smart posting, time slots, basic post statistics, advanced reporting, separate workspaces for each client, collaboration & approval workflow Multi location, Custom pricing – custom social profiles, custom team members/clients, 100,000+ post ideas library, graphics editor, smart posting, time slots, basic post statistics, advanced reporting, separate workspaces for each client, collaboration & approval workflow, platform on your domain, interface branded just for you
You can also buy a Solo plan including 3 social accounts, starting at $108, billed annually.
The Details
PromoRepublic reminds me of a customized version of Canva. It includes all the graphical power of a specialist app but allows you to do something with your social posts once you design them. As you would expect from an app featuring a graphics editor, PromoRepublic is well designed and pleasant to the eye, more so than many of the opposition social media managers. You begin by signing up, either by using your Facebook log-in or by setting up a specific PromoRepublic one.
This takes you to their standard welcome screen, which gives you four choices:
Automate posting Discover content Improve collaboration Generate reports
While the more artistic of you might jump straight into discovering and customizing content, most people will probably want to finish setting up first. You need to match PromoRepublic to each of your social accounts. If you work as part of a team, you will also want to set up your team members for collaboration, too.
Setting up PromoRepublic for each of your social accounts is particularly simple compared to some of the other apps I’ve reviewed. You set up each social media account in turn, giving relevant permissions. Note that for some social media accounts, such as Twitter, you first need to ensure that you are logged into the correct account before you try and connect in PromoRepublic. For example, I run multiple Twitter accounts. I had to log into the first Twitter account before I began the process. Once I set that up, I then went back to Twitter to log out of that account and log into the second account. I could then repeat the process in PromoRepublic, and it picked up the second account no problem. With Facebook, however, I could select the pages I wanted to run from PromoRepublic in one go during the authentication process.
One area I didn’t test was working with collaborators and multiple accounts. However, one nice feature that PromoRepublic offers is that you can set up separate Workspaces. The idea of Workspaces is to keep social profiles of different businesses sorted in folders. You can create a separate workspace for each client or activity you run social accounts for.
Probably the next logical item of set-up you should do is to set your posting schedules. You do this separately for each social account. PromoRepublic creates a suggested posting schedule for you, but you can easily alter it to how you desire. Each post slot has a color-coded category:
Blog posts Educational Engaging Motivational and Fun Promotional Other
If you don’t want to set your own timeslots, you can rely on PromoRepublic’s Autopilot. This is an AI tool that analyzes your page audience’s peak engagement. It suggests the best time options and the most relevant types of content for your audience. If you opt to use Autopilot you can’t change the times – you can merely include or exclude particular days of the week. Autopilot mode also makes better use of the categories. If you click on one of your autopilot slots, it suggests post ideas of that category type. You can either use one of those connected ideas templates as a starter for your post or start a new post from scratch.
Obviously, if you click on NEW POST in the calendar PromoRepublic assumes you are creating a post to be delivered at that time. If you begin a new post anywhere else on the app, however, you are prompted to either SCHEDULE (where you set the posting time) or ADD TO QUEUE, where the post will take up the next available slot on your chosen social network(s). When you decide to create a new post (without using a template) you are shown a screen in which you assemble your post, across multiple social networks if you choose.
You can either create a new image for the post or upload an existing photo, GIF, or video. You can type your message to go with your images and customize for each social network on which you intend to use the post. If you link to a blog post, PromoRepublic will usually be able to find the hero image of your post automatically.
As I have referred to previously, PromoRepublic’s main point of difference is its image editing software and post templates. The Graphics Editor makes editing the visuals for your post a breeze. When you first open it, you have a blank canvas. On the left you will have a sidebar menu that includes:
Ideas – the templates in the library Backgrounds – possible backgrounds for your post. You can search by keyword here to find a suitable background Objects – different types of graphics objects, e.g., Banners, Shapes, Stickers, Ribbons, Icons, Frames, Buttons, Speech Bubbles, Lines, Decorations, Emoji, Seasons Text – different types of text you can add to your image, where you can alter the font, color, size, etc.
It is best to treat the templates as a starting point. You can modify virtually every detail of them – limited only by your imagination and creative ability. While PromoRepublic has extensive post creation capabilities, it lacks some of the more heavy-duty business features found in more established apps, such as Hootsuite. The analytics are fundamental, giving just the core stats from each post. Apparently higher subscription levels provide a more detailed analytical report. PromoRepublic is developing a social monitoring module, currently in beta. You can have the best of both worlds, however. You can install the PromoRepublic app for Hootsuite, which enables you to use PromoRepublic’s Post Ideas and Graphics Editor within Hootsuite to jazz up your posts.
Conclusion
If you’re somebody who finds making visual social posts challenging, then PromoRepublic will be ideal for you. Its Graphics Editor is unsurpassed. You can select a suitable template and play around with it to customize it for your business. It means that even the most unartistic Philistine can create an eye-catching post. You can store your designs for future reuse and modification. You can easily adjust a post to make it work well across all your social networks. PromoRepublic is also one of the simpler apps to set up. It is straightforward to attach your social networks, and it knows each network’s rules and quirks and can protect you from making a mistake. The most significant omission from PromoRepublic, however, is that it doesn’t include any capability for sharing other content. While this may not be a significant problem on a social network such as Instagram – most people don’t regram others’ work – it is a real headache for Twitter, where it is considered proper etiquette to retweet others’ posts. As a heavy Twitter user, I was only able to use PromoRepublic for part of my social posting. This will change in the future, however. PromoRepublic has a public Trello board where it shows its product roadmap. It lists the ability to send curated content as being added in the “long-term” of 3-6 months away. While the details are not yet public, that change will make a massive difference to your ability to use PromoRepublic for all your social needs. PromoRepublic has real strengths in post creation – indeed, you can design some of the snazziest posts on the net without leaving the app. It is also straightforward to schedule your posts, particularly if you rely on the AI of autopilot. It lacks some of the features of the more established competition, in particular, the ability to schedule other peoples’ posts, such as retweets or sharing somebody’s Facebook posts. You can’t yet curate content using PromoRepublic, although this is signposted to change in the future.
