When you market a multi-location business, there’s a lot to consider. Do all of your stores provide the same level of service? Are all your locations active on social media? Is it easy enough to find your store on Google search and maps? What are their rankings?
Indeed, as a franchise CMO, you have a lot on your plate, but you can take at least one thing off – local marketing. By investing in marketing tools, you can tackle all known challenges faster, identify pitfalls, and spot growth opportunities for each location or network.
At a time when the customer journey is no longer linear, people expect relevant and consistent experiences that span devices, applications, and touchpoints throughout their buyer journey. That’s why brands must deliver positive interactions at every stage of the consumer journey – regardless of where and how customers shop.
That’s where marketing tools can accelerate your business growth. Depending on the tech stack, such tools can boost your online presence, spark your online reputation, increase your visibility and traffic, and drive more sales.
One of the most popular marketing platforms is SOCi. It helps scale and analyze marketing efforts on social media, listings, reviews, ads, and local pages. Since the tool targets primarily corporate users rather than local marketers, naturally it’s most popular among large enterprise brands and property franchises. For others seeking tools for robust brand management and tracking local rankings, SOCi may not seem like a relevant tool.
Let’s check these 10 SOCi alternatives and take a deep dive into similar software.
1. PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic is the most intelligent local marketing platform that helps franchisors and franchisees set up a solid digital presence across social, search, and review management platforms to succeed locally and grow. With PromoRepublic’s customizable dashboards, local competitive intelligence, and 300+ data points gathered across social, reviews, and search, it’s easier to grow awareness and engagement in local communities and generate more local sales.
Pros:
- Adaptability to businesses of all sizes – from small businesses and agencies to enterprises and national multi-location brands
- Uploadable branded templates, fonts, and palettes that make it easy to control branding
- A robust built-in Graphics Editor with the look and feel of Canva but integrated with a calendar to schedule and post at scale
- A social inbox for monitoring and engaging in all social conversations, mentions, comments, and messages in one place to respond faster and keep communities happy
- Content performance, local search-result, and ranking analytics with more data points compared to SOCi
- Customizable white-label solutions
- Training and education for franchisees
- Permissions for local content management and localization that can be set up by the corporate office
Cons:
- Covers major review networks but excludes niche networks
- No chatbot
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a one-stop solution for social media management. It integrates with the leading social networks and helps users make sense of their data, in an easily navigable set of tools.
Pros:
- A user-friendly, feature-packed interface
- A robust social management toolset with scheduling and automated posting
- A central library of multimedia assets to create content
- A wide range of insightful reporting options
- Effective collaboration and automation tools
- Social listening for trend identification
- Ability to strategize, plan, execute, and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns
Cons:
- No tools for listing management
- No local performance, search-result, or GBP analytics
- No tools to create surveys or collect feedback
- No franchisee training or education
- User-based pricing makes the product expensive for larger teams
3. Birdeye
A customer experience marketing platform with a focus on review management and messaging to attract, convert, and delight local customers.
Pros:
- A single dashboard to manage, update, and track info for thousands of locations
- Tools for review generation and review marketing leverage customer feedback
- Custom-made surveys to capture real-time feedback through a drag-and-drop interface
- Natural language processing that helps discover emerging positive and negative sentiment trends
- One inbox to manage all customer experiences
Cons:
- No support for social media advertising or boosting – only basic social publishing
- Limited social publishing functionality: only supports Facebook and Twitter
- No peak scheduling or content performance analytics
- No ad management
- No asset management or brand control
- No support for local pages to help their users increase visibility in local search results
- No social listening
4. Chatmeter
Chatmeter is a local listing and social media management solution that’s designed for enterprise businesses and agencies. Its social suite facilitates local marketing through social media.
Pros:
- Inexpensive, easy-to-learn platform with a clean interface
- Creating, posting, and content scheduling across major social platforms
- Monitoring of major review sites in one central location
- A tool for building and managing local social media pages
- A bulk editor for simple creation, updating, and publishing of location listings
- Social media analytics that track the social profiles of each location to gain a panoramic view of social impact
Cons:
- No organized content library or graphics editor inside the platform
- No content suggestions or approval workflows
- No dynamic fields, so no automated content localization for local pages
5. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a social media management tool that helps businesses and agencies expand and grow their social media presence. It’s part of an ecosystem of 40+ products that can complement each other.
Pros:
- Allows planning and scheduling of posts via a calendar, which then automates the posting process
- Two-way admin asset management: a library for brand graphics and an RSS feed for trending content
- Social monitoring capabilities through Facebook hashtags and Twitter
- Zoho Social can be integrated with Zoho CRM to help engage with prospects and generate leads from social media
- Ticket creation on social media for support team to see and resolve via integration with Zoho Desk
Cons:
- No Tik Tok integration
- No tools to manage local SEO or track analytics
- No built-in graphics editor – basic integration with Canva instead
- No reputation management
6. Loomly
Loomly is the social media management solution that empowers your marketing team to grow a successful brand online through collaboration, publishing, and analytics features.
Pros:
- Easy management of all social media content — organic posts and ads — from one platform
- Automated publishing for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and GBP
- Post suggestions based on trending topics, RSS feeds, date-related events for better content strategy
- Hashtag manager based on content and trending hashtags. and a UTM parameter generator for campaign attribution
- A collaborative review and approval workflow based on needs
Cons:
- Limited media library with no asset manager
- No single place for accessing and responding to customer comments and reviews
- No tools for improving local visibility and increasing traffic
- No listing management
- Basic analytics
7. Reputation
Reputation is an online reputation management platform that translates customer feedback data into insights that companies with multiple locations can use to learn from and grow.
Pros:
- Integrated scheduling capabilities to automate social posts
- Built-in approval workflows for teams
- Management of all messages, comments, and inquiries across all locations from one centralized inbox
- Social listening with real-time alerts
- Centralized reviews with extra tools to request, answer, and analyze feedback
- Accurate and complete listings ensured across all locations
- A сompetitive dashboard report to make improvements
Cons:
- No paid social ad solution
- A limited social boosting product (no custom audience, distributed budget, or automated boosting support)
- No sentiment analysis
- No visibility into your competitors’ performance
8. Brightlocal
Brightlocal is a local marketing automation platform that enables businesses to increase their online visibility, manage their reputation, and gain more potential customers from local search.
Pros:
- Hyperlocal and accurate rank tracking at a global scale
- A solid review management tool with a review generation feature allowing creation of feedback campaigns and replying to reviews from within the app.
- A top-notch citation tracker that enables “spying” on competitors
- Agency features like white label reporting, client access to dashboards, and local search audit
- Robust and automated reporting
Cons:
- Primarily a tool for local SEO and reputation management, not an all-in-one tool
- No asset manager to store, share, and manage branded content
- No brand control
9. Rallio
Rallio is a tool that combines social media technology, creative services, and employee advocacy. It enables brands to manage their entire social media presence, online reputation, and online directory listings in one dashboard for all locations.
Pros:
- Social technology built specifically for franchising
- One centralized place where all brand assets live
- Brand message controlled by implementing content approval
- A reputation management system that gives franchisees the ability to monitor and respond to all their online reviews from one simple spot
- Analysis of both corporate and local social content performance
- Control and optimization of data across 30+ directories
- A tool for creating employee advocacy and reward programs
Cons:
- Not a fit for smaller companies
- No local SEO tools
- Review generation via surveys and coupons as add-on
10. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a well-known social media platform for publishing, advertising, and tracking post performance and amplifying brands on social.
Pros:
- Easy collaboration on planning, creating, and publishing content
- Approval workflows to ensure consistent and compliant posts
- Monitoring of messages from different networks in a single view
- Automatic RSS publishing to your LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook аccounts.
- Social media marketing campaigns measured and displayed through comprehensive reporting
- Hootsuite Academy for onboarding teams quickly and training employees
Cons:
- Centered on social media management and measurement of its results
- No extra tools for brand management, reputation, or local SEO
- No tools for listing management
- No built-in library to store branded content and no graphics editor to customize it or upload branding elements
- Slightly outdated interface, and somewhat high learning curve
FAQs about SOCi Alternatives
Q: What is the best SOCi alternative?
A: PromoRepublic. It offers social media marketing tools such as Insights, Social Media Management, Brand Management, Local SEO, and Reputation Management. Franchise brands use PromoRepublic to improve their local marketing performance and win more local customers.
Q: Who are SOCi’s competitors?
A:
PromoRepublic
Sprout Social
Birdeye
Chatmeter
Zoho Social
Loomly
Reputation
Brightlocal
Rallio
Hootsuite
Q: Does PromoRepublic offer a free plan?
A: PromoRepublic doesn’t offer a free trial but agencies and enterprises can book a demo to see how we can fit.
