Crowdfire Review 2022: Real-Life Tutorial of All Features (Listening, Curation, Reporting)
Are you looking for an all-in-one social media tool to create, manage and schedule your content? Then Crowdfire could be the app you’ve been looking for.
With social commerce predicted to grow 3 times as fast as e-commerce and the number of social media users worldwide rocketing towards 5 billion, it’s never been more important to ensure you’re on top of your strategy to maximise results.
In this post, I’ll share everything you need to know about Crowdfire, so that you can decide if it’s right for you.
Let’s go!
What is Crowdfire? Crowdfire Explained
Crowdfire is a social media management tool that allows individuals, small businesses, social media managers, and brands to drive results through social media.
It is an all-in-one solution that provides social media scheduling, engagement, analytics, Social listening, and CRM services.
Crowdfire connects to a wealth of social networks, including Facebook Pages and Groups, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin Profiles and LinkedIn Pages, YouTube, and TikTok.
If you have blog posts to share, Crowdfire also integrates seamlessly with the likes of Medium and Wordpress.
For e-commerce customers, Crowdfire supports integration with Shopify and Etsy so that you can automatically share your latest products on social media.
And for streamers, Crowdfire even includes the option to schedule posts from Twitch.
Note: The number of social accounts and online properties you can connect to at any one time will depend on the plan you’re signed up to.
Crowdfire Features
Just some of the things that Crowdfire can do include:
- Schedule all your social media posts in its calendar and post them automatically at the best date and time of day to suit you.
- Use Crowdfire’s Queue Meter to ensure you have enough content scheduled for the week ahead — an at-a-glance look at whether your timeline is going to be populated for the next 7 days.
- Create one post and have Crowdfire automatically tailor it to suit a variety of social profiles.
- Automatically curate and share articles and images from around the web that resonate with your audience, including from RSS feeds.
- Monitor and listen to social conversations and reply to mentions from a centralized dashboard using text, images, and GIFs.
- Use Crowdfire’s competitor analysis to spy on your rivals and up your game — see their top posts and an overview of their performance.
- Delve into advanced analytics to monitor and tweak your performance, and generate beautiful, ready-to-present reports where you can highlight the data points that matter to you. Schedule them to arrive in your inbox every week or every month.
How to Use Crowdfire
Using Crowdfire to manage your social media marketing for business couldn’t be easier. Here’s a quick guided tour of how it all works.
1. Connect your social accounts to Crowdfire
First, you’ll want to connect your social accounts: From Facebook and Twitter, to Pinterest and TikTok.
You can also connect your YouTube channel, Wordpress blog, Shopify shop, Twitch channel, and more.
Then it’s time to start filling up your content calendar!
2. Ways to schedule content with Crowdfire
There are several ways to start populating your calendar in Crowdfire, so let’s take a look.
First, there’s the basic Compose option. Simply create a new post on the fly by hitting the Compose button. Select the account(s) you want to post to; type your message; add an image or video, then finish it off with a location tag and hashtags.
You can choose to post right away, at a specific time, or let Crowdfire decide when to post — when your audience is most active, i.e the Best Time. If you wish, you can also manually set your own Best Time.
Note: You can also compose on any specific date by clicking it in the Calendar.
Next, there’s Content Curation. And this is where Crowdfire will really help you to populate your calendar with ease.
The Articles option allows you to select topics, which Crowdfire will then use to generate a list of relevant articles that you can share or schedule instantly.
When you hit share, you’ll get an instant preview of the post and an option to edit it before you publish it to the social profiles of your choosing (just hit the pencil icon).
The Images option is similar to articles, but — you guessed it — just images relevant to your niche. Again, just hit share to schedule any image from the list that is generated by Crowdfire, and share it to your audience.
The My Posts section shows a list of posts recommended from the blogs, videos, stores and various other property channels that you have to Crowdfire, and they appear here automatically.
The RSS section generates a list of posts from any RSS feed that you give to Crowdfire. If you don’t know your RSS feed address, simply entering the URL of a blog post on your website will likely be enough. Here, Crowdfire has pulled in a list of blog posts on my website.
Again, these can all be easily shared and scheduled at a time that suits you.
Lastly, you can upload a .csv file to upload posts in bulk.
When you have a ready list of posts that you want to schedule in advance, then instead of composing each post individually and scheduling it, you can simply use the Bulk Post feature.
With the Bulk Posts feature, you can simply enter all the posts in an Excel sheet/Google sheets or any other document and then convert it to a .csv format and then upload it.
Here’s how scheduled posts look in the Crowdfire calendar (you can also view all scheduled posts as a list).
Crowdfire Social Listening Explained
Crowdfire’s Listening tool will help you listen to everything that’s being said about you and your competitors online. From a single dashboard, you can:
- Track your mentions, their volume and sentiments behind it.
- Track your competitor’s keywords to monitor their performance on social media.
- Analyse your efforts using charts and graphs to easily understand what’s working for you (and your competitors) and what isn’t.
- Find the most influential sources, helping you with brand awareness.
In this example, I’ve searched for “yoga nyc” — which I could use to snoop on the posts of yoga studios in New York City. If I lived in New York City and was a yoga instructor. Which I sadly do not!
We’re able to see data including the number of mentions, social media reach, amount o interactions, and whether those interactions were positive or negative — the sentiment.
Further down the report, we get a specific look at the most popular mentions and the latest mentions of your listening keyword — ideal for seeing what your competition is up to, and whether its a strategy you might want to emulate.
And further down the report again, Crowdfire tells us which authors related to your keyword are the most popular, and where their content is coming from. Again, this information can be used to help influence your own content strategy.
Crowdfire Analytics
Crowdfire offers a wealth of analytics — whether you want a quick overview of where your social media strategy is heading, or want to deep dive into the nuances of your content’s performance.
The Analytics overview tells you at-a-glance info about your social media follower numbers, post amount, likes, and interactions.
The Advanced Analytics in Crowdfire provides a much more detailed look about every aspect of your posting strategy, with data and charts ranging from audience growth and engagement breakdown — split into content type, and whether the content was organic or promoted.
All of these reports can be shared or downloaded as PDFs, which make them great for generating instant discussion material for your team.
The Competitor Analysis function in Crowdfire lets you search for and generate a list of your rivals; a place where you can quickly gather intel on their performance — from total page likes and engagement, plus the ability to view their Top Posts. Perfect for taking a sneaky peek and seeing what you can apply to your own content strategy.
Crowdfire Reports lets you generate instant, custom-built reports for all of your connected social profiles. They take seconds to build, look great, and can be easily shared amongst your team — with all the data points you’d expect — from post performance to engagement, and more.
Crowdfire Pricing: How much does Crowdfire cost?
Crowdfire offers four paid plans, which you can subscribe to annually or monthly.
The Plus plan is best for solo-preneurs and small businesses. It costs $9.99 per month on the Monthly plan or $7.48 per month on the Annual Plan ($89.76 for the year).
The Premium Plan is best for medium-sized businesses. It costs $ 37.48 per month on the Monthly plan for $37.48 per month on the Annual plan ($449.76 for the year)
The VIP plan is best for agencies and larger businesses. It costs $99.99 per month on the Monthly plan and $74.98 per month on the Annual plan ($899.76 for the year).
The Business Plan is also suited to large business and agencies, and comes equipped with expansive social listenings tools that aren’t offered in any of the other plans. However, these tools can be accessed from any plan via add-on subscriptions (see below).
Note: An annual subscription will save you 25% over the year versus any monthly paid plan, which is quite a hefty discount and certainly worth it if you’re wanting to make the most of everything Crowdfire has to offer.
Let’s break down the features available in each of Crowdfire’s paid plans:
Crowdfire Plus Plan Features
Being Crowdfire’s cheapest subscription, the Plus plan does come with some limitations — namely that you won’t get be able to see or reply to social mentions, and nor you won’t get access to the competitor analysis option.
It’s still a fair price for what you get and great to get a good feel for the produc, but I would think that most businesses would see these missing features as pretty essential, so worth considering an upgrade. What you do get with the Crowdfire Plus plan is as follows:
Scheduling and Publishing:
- Link 5 social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, and Pinterest.
- Schedule up to 100 posts per account
- Use the Chrome extension to share articles
- Setup a custom posting schedule
- Share video posts to your social accounts
- Bulk schedule posts for ease and speed
- Schedule using Crowdfire’s calendar view
Content Curation
- Unlimted articles recommended for your topics
- Unlimted images recommended for Instagram and Pinterest growth
- Curate content from your blog, YouTube Channel, Shopify, and Etsy shops
- Connect up to 5 RSS feeds
- Get hashtag recommendations
- Support for multiple image posts
- Auto-tailored posts for each platform with a preview before posting
Crowdfire Premium Plan Features
Crowdfire’s Premium Plan unlocks the full potential of the app. You get everything in the Plus plan, but also you can:
- Link up to 10 social media accounts
- Connect up to 15 RSS feeds
- Track mentions for your Twitter and Facebook accounts in your team inbox
- Send replies to all mentions with text, images and GIFs
- Run a competitor analysis of 2 competitors per social account
- Add and manage 1 profile
- Add and manage 1 team member
- Create up to 3 custom reports
- Get access to e-mail support
Crowdfire VIP Plan Features
Crowdfire’s VIP plan is moving into its top-tier space, so you get more of everything in the lower-tier plans. That’s everything in the Premium plan, plus:
- Link up to 25 social accounts
- Schedule up to 800 posts per account
- Link up to 25 RSS feeds
- 20 competitors per social account
- Create up to 5 custom reports
- Add and manage 2 profiles — $15 for each additional profile
- Add and manage 2 team members — $10 for each additional team member
- Access to Crowdfire’s priority support service
Crowdfire Business Plan
Crowdfire’s Business Plan is the cream of the crop, so you get more of everything available in the previous plans, plus access to a whole bunch of listening tools not available in any other plan. With the Business Plan, you’ll get access to:
- Up to 50 linked accounts
- Add and manage up to 5 profiles
- Add and manage up to 5 team members
- Add up to 15 listening keywords
- Receive up to 50K listening mentions per month
- Get listening updates every 12 hours
- Listening Data analysis
- Listening Sentiment analysis
- Listening PDF, PPT & CSV Download report
- Listening Interactions
- Listening Social Media Reach
- Listening Share of Voice
- Listening Competitor Analysis
Crowdfire Add-on Listening Plans
If you still want access to Crowdfire’s powerful listening features, but don’t need something as expansive as the Business plan, there is an option to add listening options as a monthly or annual add-on.
Add-on 1 is $30 per month or $22.49 per month billed annually.
For that, you’ll get:
- 3 Projects
- 9 keywords (3 per project)
- 5K mentions / mo
- Update every 12h
- Data analysis
- Sentiment analysis
- Limited PDF & PPT reports
Add-on 2 is $150.00 per month or $112.49 per month billed annually.
You’ll get everything in Add-on 1, but with more on top including:
- 5 projects
- 15 keywords (3 per project)
- 50k mentions / mo
- Update every hour
- Unlimited PDF and PPT reports
Add-on 3 costs $280.00 per month or $209.99 per month billed annually
For that, you’ll get everything in Add-on 2 plus more:
- 10 projects
- 30 keywords per project (3 per project)
- 100K mentions / month
- Real-time updates
- Data analysis
- Sentiment analysis
- Unlimited PDF, PPT, and CSV reports
Does Crowdfire offer a free plan or free trial?
Yes! Crowdfire offers a free plan with no time limit, in case you want to try before you buy.
However, there are limitations that include that you won’t be able to track mentions or send replies, there’s no access to Crowdfire’s competitor analysis, and no option to connect RSS Feeds. The number of posts you can schedule, crucially, is also rather limited.
With the free plan, you can:
- Link up to three social accounts (choose from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram — Pinterest is not supported in the free plan).
- Schedule up to 10 posts per account
- Use the Crowdfire Chrome extension to schedule and share articles
- Access unlimited article and image recommendations to share to your profiles
- Curate content from your own blogs, YouTube Channel, and Shopify or Etsy shops
- Get hashtag recommendation
- Get auto-tailored posts for each social network with a preview available before posting.
- 1 day’s data of social and advanced analytics
Crowdfire Promo Code / Discount
Crowdfire doesn’t offer any promotional codes, but you can use its free plan for as long as you wish before deciding to upgrade.
Crowdfire: See unfollowers and followers gone?
When Crowdfire first launched, it was focused on being a “social trimmer” — allowing you to follow those who followed you and unfollow those who didn’t. It was a way to streamline your audience and allow you to focus on genuine engagement with individuals.
However, a change to Instagram’s API in 2017 meant that Crowdfire could no longer provide these features — including showing data like recent followers and unfollowers, and non-followers.
This development was the catalyst for Crowdfire to develop into the social media marketing tool that it is today — a way for busy people to create engaging social media content super quickly, and increase exposure to their target audience.
Crowdfire Pros and Cons
So there you have it! I played around with the Premium version of Crowdfire for several weeks, and was overall very impressed by its features and useability.
Its wealth of integrations, including for Shopify, Etsy, and TikTok will please a lot of users — and I really liked the listening tools, and how easy it is to generate ready-made reports.
If I’d improve one thing, it would be for the content curation to widen in scope — tools like Missinglettr (reviewed here) appear to do that better, but hopefully Crowdfire can up its game on this one over time.
Are you a Crowdfire user or looking to become one? Here’s that link to sign up for free and check it out:
