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It’s no secret that comprehensive social media management tools and softwares are essential when it comes to streamlining social media as a service for your clients.
If you’ve ended up here, you are likely taking time to research the different social media tools to determine which one is the best fit for your needs. While it’s extremely important to weigh your options, we also know it can also be overwhelming to attempt to compare the pros and cons of all of the available tools yourself.
Lucky for you, that is exactly what we do for you! Our team here at MixBloom is always testing new tools, softwares, and platforms to ensure we are providing the best possible service for our agency partners and their clients.
HeyOrca is one of the many social media management tools that has become available in recent years and we wanted to take this opportunity to do a deep-dive (get it… because… Orca) into the tool, its features and how it works, to help you determine if it is the right fit for you.
What is HeyOrca?
HeyOrca is a collaborative social media calendar tool designed specifically for digital agencies and their clients.
Oscar the Orca is their beloved mascot, a visual representation of their company’s character – sociable and fun. It is a great way to make killer whales look adorable. We will give them that.
The main features of the tool include:
- Content Calendar: An easy-to-use visual calendar format for each client, allowing separate users and social media accounts.
- Content Preview: See mock-ups of what each post would look like when it goes live, prior to publishing.
- Collaboration: Streamlined way to leave comments on content, ask questions, and offer feedback. Clients don’t see comments left by your internal team.
- Content Approval: Efficient content review and approval process for clients to leave feedback or approve content.
- Publishing: Easy content publishing directly from their tool.
- Reporting: Pull comprehensive reports that are easily digestible by your client.
Content Calendar Feature
The main feature on the platform is the content calendar - its function is to help you visually organize your client’s social media content. Each of your clients will have their own content calendar that will allow you to arrange content, see the status of each post, collaborate with your internal team, manage feedback and approvals, or make edits to content, all in one place.
Below you can see what your agency dashboard would look like. Your clients would all have their own calendars that would be easily accessible to you from this dashboard view.
Notice that there are numbers and colors under each calendar. The numbers and colors are indications of post status within the calendar. The color grey stands for how many posts are in draft, yellow stands for posts awaiting approval, green for posts that are approved, and red for posts that are rejected. The design of the dashboard is visually pleasing and easy to navigate.
To add a new calendar, simply click “+ Add Calendar” to add a new client to the dashboard.
When you select “+ Add Calendar” you will be prompted to name the calendar, set the time zone, and connect the client’s social channels.Once you have a calendar set up and ready to go, you can then plan social content according to the scheduled day and time. You can also easily drag and drop a piece of content from one day to another.
Content Preview Feature
Within each calendar, there is a “mock-ups” feature that allows your internal team as well as clients to see what the content will look like before it goes live. You can see the format of the graphic, the readability of the content, and the spacing between assets, all prior to publishing.
Collaboration Feature
Within each calendar, stakeholders can communicate with your team or with one another by making comments, suggesting edits, or leaving feedback on each post. This functionality solves one of the biggest problems for agencies - delayed communication and approvals.
Comments between your own internal team are hidden from your client to allow for streamlined internal communication and avoidance of confusion on the client’s part.
Content Approval Feature
Clients can approve or reject posts directly in the HeyOrca dashboard and posts will only publish after approvals have been granted. Once new content has been prepared by your team and is ready to share, it can be easily shared with the client by “creating a sharable link.”
Simply select and share one or multiple posts at once or use the filtering functionality to share a grouping of posts for approval. You can filter by time frame, post status, tag, and campaign name. The selected content will populate in the shareable link.
The link will give the client the ability to browse through drafts, approve or make edits, and leave feedback, without having to create their own HeyOrca account. This is a great way to save time for both your team and clients!
Publishing Feature
Once content has been reviewed, approved, and scheduled, it can be published directly from HeyOrca to the client’s social media channels.
The following platforms can be integrated with HeyOrca:
- Google My Business
Reporting Feature:
It’s important to provide your client with easy-to-digest reports to show them the ROI of your services. You can do so by automatically generating reports from HeyOrca for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram for Business to share with your client.
HeyOrca Plans and Pricing
One of the unique features of HeyOrca is that instead of paying a set monthly rate, you pay per calendars needed. You also have the ability to choose between monthly or annual rates and they offer discounts if you add a certain number of calendars.
Monthly: The monthly rate is $99 per calendar, per month. This price includes unlimited users, 10 social profiles, unlimited scheduled posts, and all of the usual features listed above.
Once you add five or more calendars, the monthly cost is discounted to $59 per calendar, per month.
Annual: If you prefer to pay annually, the cost breakdown is $84 per calendar, per month. Similarly to the monthly plan, this price includes unlimited users, 10 social profiles, unlimited scheduled posts, and all of the usual features listed above.
Once you add five or more calendars, the monthly cost is discounted to $49 per calendar, per month. They also offer you the ability to speak with one of their team members about a bulk discount for further savings.
You can find more information about pricing here: https://heyorca.com/about/pricing/
Pros of Using HeyOrca
Overall, HeyOrca is a great tool for agencies. It’s most appealing feature is it’s simplistic design and visually-pleasing user interface. The drag and drop content feature makes it easy to arrange posts within the calendar and the content scheduling process is easy to navigate.
The share-ability of content with the client is streamlined and customizable, allowing for a seamless collaboration between your internal team and external stakeholders. If you have an internal content creation team and you are just looking for a streamlined process, HeyOrca may be a possible solution for you.
Cons of Using HeyOrca
If you are looking for an all-in-one social media content solution, then HeyOrca may not be a fit for you. While they offer a solution for content review, approval, and publishing, they do not offer content creation of any sort.
Additionally, HeyOrca is also not a white label service meaning you would be unable to utilize the tools under your own agency name. There is no way to hide the HeyOrca brand so your clients would know you are using an external service. If you are looking for a white label service to resell to your clients, HeyOrca is not it.
Lastly, price is always something to consider. While the $99/month or $84 per month may seem cost-effective at a glance, it can easily add up once you are adding 5, 10, 20 clients or more.
How does HeyOrca compare to MixBloom?
First of all, it’s important to note that the main comparison between HeyOrca and MixBloom is that MixBloom offers social media content creation services, which HeyOrca does not provide. In addition to that, we also offer many of the same features that HeyOrca does, on top of content creation.
MixBloom is a complete white labeled content creation service which also features a unique white label dashboard.
The Main Features of MixBloom Include:
- Content Creators: MixBloom offers a team of experienced content creators and social media managers to create original social media content for your clients.
- White Label Capabilities: We offer a completely white labeled service which allows you to sell their services and utilize their dashboard, all under your own agency name and branding.
- Scalability: Because of our all-in-one content creation solution, you can easily sell our services to your clients and add recurring revenue without having to add more work to your in-house team.
- Content Review: Our unique dashboard allows you to easily review prepared content, make edits, leave feedback, or approve content. You will also be able to easily see which post is scheduled to be published on which date.
- Content Approval: Our white label dashboard allows you to easily share a link with your clients so they can view, edit, approve or leave feedback on individual posts.
- Content Publishing: Once content has been approved by you or your client, our team will manage all of the scheduling and publishing of content.
Content Creator Feature
MixBloom has a team of experienced content creators and social media managers who design original graphics, curate images, write custom copy, and include hashtags with hashtag research.
Each client is assigned a MixBloom content creator who is familiarized with the brand, does research on the brand and their industry, and then creates original content that aligns with the brand’s social media goals and objectives.
White Label Feature
MixBloom is designed as a white label service and offers a unique white label dashboard that can be branded for your agency.
This feature allows your agency to resell our social media content creation services as your own service, without having to introduce an outsourced team or tool to your clients.
Scalability Feature
Our services and our dashboard were designed with scalability in mind. We allow you to outsource content creation, content review, scheduling and publishing so your internal team can focus on more lucrative responsibilities. Because of this, you are able to onboard any number of clients with us, adding recurring revenue, without adding to your existing workload.
This setup is extremely scalable and easy-to-implement into your existing agency workflow.
Content Review Feature
As an agency partner of ours, you are able to review all of your client’s content from one dashboard using a dropdown menu to quickly toggle between clients. From here, you’ll be able to see the graphic, copy, and hashtags for each post and platform, and see the date and time that the post is scheduled to publish.
Content queues up from the soonest to publish to the furthest out, allowing you to review and approve in chronological order.
From here, you also have the ability to share the content with your client using a unique white-labeled share link that is populated by our dashboard. You can simply share this link with your client and they are then able to open up the white-labeled dashboard (without logging in) to review, approve, or leave feedback on content themselves.
From here, they can approve, edit, or leave feedback on content.
It’s important to note that when your client sends feedback on a post from the white label dashboard, you get the notification to your email, but our team is also notified so we can begin implementing any requested feedback or changes right away. We typically have all changes made within 1-2 business days. This workflow removes you as the middleman when it comes to feedback and edits and saves you and your team a significant amount of time in the back-and-forth.
Content Approval Feature
Once a post is approved by the client, you will see a green checkmark to highlight that the post is approved and ready to schedule and publish.
MixBloom Plans and Pricing
Here at MixBloom, we offer straightforward plans and pricing. Our social media content plans are based on the number of posts your clients need, ranging from 8, 12, to 20 or more posts per month. All of our plans include original content, as well as access to our white label dashboard and all content review and approval workflows.
Pricing starts at $249/month per client for eight social media posts per month to up to $499/month, per client for 20 social media posts per month. All of our plans include content for 1-4 social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram)
You can find more information about our plans and pricing at https://www.mixbloom.com/pricing
(if you're a marketing agency, get in touch to know about agency discounts and MixBloom's white label social media offer)
Final Thoughts: MixBloom vs. HeyOrca
When it comes down to it, HeyOrca is a great tool that offers a solution for the most common challenges with social media scheduling and management. But, what HeyOrca does not offer is the one feature that you need to scale, grow, and take your agency to the next level - a partner in social media content creation.
With MixBloom, you get almost all of the features that HeyOrca offers, in addition to our social media content creation services, at no extra cost.
The best part is, your clients never have to know we exist! You continue to own the relationship with your client, while we work behind the scenes in support of your clients goals and the exponential growth of your agency.
HeyOrca is a valuable tool and if you aren’t looking for content creation services then it may be worth trying out, but if you are looking for an all-in-one solution which includes original content for your clients, MixBloom may be a better fit for you!
See a comprehensive demo of MixBloom’s service and unique dashboard here.
