The Syndwire is Social Posting and syndication tool not very familiar social marketing automation platform. Their homepage reports close to 4000 users worldwide. Compared to giants like Hootsuite or Buffer, that is nothing because they count their client base in millions.
Unlike Hootsuite or Buffer, Syndwire is not trying to be everything to everybody. Instead, their target audience seems to be people who want to do video SEO and look at social activity as content syndication. That is a clear insight into the minds of the authors of Syndwire. They would like to go after solopreneur marketers who want to scale their business using automation.
So are these 4000 people brilliant for using Syndwire, or they are the only ones who fell victim to a little, wannabe Social Marketing Automation Platform?
Well, as voting does not define truth, let’s get a bit deeper in Syndwire and look past their sales pitch to find out just how great (or terrible) it is.
Syndwire Features
The Syndwire Features list is not in plain sight. You’d have to dig in to find it. But solopreneur marketers are used to digging for information. This approach is then a smart marketing strategy to get people to visit more pages on the SyndWire site and engage with the brand more and more.
As we’ve developed an analysis methodology that cuts past the sales pitches, let’s go step by step to discover the essential features of Syndwire.
Syndwire Connectivity to Social Networks
Regardless of your intent in using a social marketing automation platform, the very first requirement is that this tool would connect to the crucial social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google+. Any other connectivity abilities are a welcomed plus.
As the methodology of analysis here is to cut through the fluff, here is the list of sites Syndwire connects to (I’ve bolded the key social networks for easier notice):
- Youtube
- Dailymotion
- Typepad
- Linkedin Group
- net
- Slash Dot
- Kipt
- Yahoo Biz
- Blogger
- Google Sites
- Delicious
- Diigo
- Feedspot
- Folkd
- Joomla
- InstaPaper
- Linka Gogo
- Drupal
- LiveJournal
- Newsvine
- Sooop it
- Druple Gardens
- Stumbleupon
- Tumblr
- com
- Self Hosted WordPress
- Devianart
- com
- Devianart
Although the list is impressive (but not as impressive as Hootsuite’s 150 connections via App Dashboard), looking at the list closer reveals great problem:
- No connectivity with Facebook at all means you won’t be able to leverage the largest social network in the world
- No connectivity with Pinterest, the largest growing social network in the world that targets young ladies in their 20somethings which constitute over 60% of the active population on Pinterest
- No connectivity to Google+ which gears at techno-savvy males aged 25-45.
This problem is similar to most social marketing automation platforms. They go after the numbers instead of going after the features a marketer needs.
There is no serious marketer out there that does not leverage The Big Five (Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google+) social networks because they offer a unique punch.
Syndwire Social Updates Scheduling
Besides connecting to the key Big Five, you also want the ability to automate your social activity. In comes Scheduling. So let’s see how Syndwire handles this feature.
Syndwire Scheduler with one word: Sucks. It’s not a scheduler as you’d expect to see. It is only a postponer rather than a scheduler.
Why am I saying this? If I want to set up a status update or create a bookmark for a recent blog post I’ve created, Syndwire allows me only to pick a single date of when this new post should go on. Now, while this is OK for some people. But it won’t be ok for most people as you’ll have to create each update individually and “schedule” it.
Syndwire Content Spinner
Syndwire is the first and perhaps the only social media automation platform so far that addresses duplicate content on social media. However, it’s only addressing it, not solving the problem of automated content rewriting.
The image above is a screenshot of how you ought to create your status update so that this content can be spun using TheBestSpinner.com. See this video for more info on the Syndwire content spinning. This tool mostly used for creating low-quality content. Furthermore, used for inflating a site’s content footprint using a single “master” article that is then somewhat photocopied into as many articles as you’d want while switching some words only to make it look unique. While this did work a few years ago, Google has now gone so advanced in assessing the content value that these spun articles will be labeled as low-quality material. Moreover, Google will hit your site with one of the Panda updates that went after such low-quality websites.
If you notice the syntax of the status update with the brackets and columns, these are only ways to tell the content spinner that it ought to use Hi/Hello/Hey there interchangeably in different articles and thus seemingly create original content. But as Google now understands the meaning of sentences using a vast pool of synonyms for all the words, these spun articles are only tricking you into believing you are posting unique content. Google knows better.
Syndwire Social Engagement Capabilities
Social engagement, as you should already know, is the key reason for doing social marketing. If you don’t initiate a conversation with your audience, your social media activity is just a resource train. But Syndwire seems to be ignoring this inevitable fact, and instead of offering social engagement, they only provide a one-way communication system:
- posting of Updates,
- creating social Bookmarks and
- creating Blog posts
You have already seen the Post Update screen in the previous screenshot. That is basically a feature that allows you to write up something smart and post it on your social profiles with a single click. Nothing fancy tons of services do this for you. For free.
The Social Bookmarking feature is interesting as you get to insert a Title, URL, Description and Image for a social bookmark you’d want to post on those 30+ networks. Now while this is an interesting feature, it is superfluous. We don’t create social bookmarks nowadays. Instead, we’d be sharing already created blog posts from our websites onto social media. Maybe you’d want the social automation platform to pull all these details itself.
The Blog Creator feature is interesting- On the surface. But you don’t get to create a meta description, which is kind of important especially for people who want to go after organic ranking. You also don’t get to create Title and ALT for the images you create, and you also don’t have the Caption feature which is one more way to optimize your images for SEO.
An interesting feature which can be very useful for creating more social traction is the RSS Feeds feature. Tha is where you take RSS feeds from some authoritative websites for your niche and post their updates on your social profiles.
In the screenshot above you’ll recognize the RSS feeds of some of the top websites for online marketing (MecLabs’MarketingExperiments being my personal favorite). While I acknowledge the sleekness of using Meclabs’posts on my business profiles, this is more of a lost opportunity case than a killer feature. You’d rather want to find the top shared content on a particular niche and then write a complementary/review/comparison blog post on a given issue and share that link instead of just syndicating other peoples’ texts.
When all is said and done, however, Syndwire offers no engagement with your audience. It’s a free tool. You get to broadcast your links. There’s no way for you to track if anyone has commented on your posts so you can engage them in a discussion and move a Visitor toward a Buyer stage.
Syndwire Social Analytics
While mainstream tools like Hootsuite and Buffer integrate with the analytics sections of Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest/Etc. Syndwire seems to be completely uninterested about Key Performance Indicators such as Shares, Likes, Comments, Retweets, Repins etc.
The Dashboard view in the image above is the only “analytics” you get from Syndwire. And it’s just a fancy activity counter really so you have no actionable information other than the number of posts you created using Syndwire.
Syndwire Pricing
Pricing seems reasonable for a platform that will be saving you hours of work on social channels. If you consider that as a duly executed social marketing effort, you will be spending at least 3-4 hours per month only in reposting current and old links. Factor-in tracking of all social profiles and engaging your audience and social media marketing will swell to a minimum of 20 work hours per month. Even if you’d use a Virtual Assistant to handle your social presence, you are looking for a minimum of $400/mo. So anything below this number is a solid deal.
Syndwire is a great deal then, as prices start at $99/mo for a 10.000 posts package up to $499/mo for unlimited posts with a Featured Posts Que:
While fees aren’t bad at all, the problem with no connectivity with Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ will be a killer for many smart marketers. I also didn’t like the fact that the button on the pricing table says Try Now but in reality, you cannot try it. You have to buy it to try it, and they don’t take any refunds (see image below). So it’s not an issue of trying at all. That is misleading and yet another red flag for me.
Syndwire Signup Procedure
Companies sometimes will not allow you to create a free/test account because they want to limit squandering resources on tire-kickers. But sometimes, especially if the company is using a lot of hype on their sales page, they won’t let you try out their software for free because they know that their app isn’t all that great anyway. So they coerce you to buy, and once you cash out, your mind flips into defensive mode, trying to justify the expenditure at any cost possible.
While the signup procedure is straight-forward, Syndwire is not even allowing refunds. Again, as the methodology of this research is to cut through the fluff, I’m seeing several red flags going off here:
- No trial period
- No Refund
- No detailed explanation of the features
- No Contact Us page
- No official Facebook page to get in touch with the company
All this tells me that while their sales page is great, the software may not be as great.
Pros
Syndwire connects to 32 social networks and blogging networks like Blogger and WordPress.com, so if you are not overly zealous about SEO tweaks, you can even use Syndwire as your central point of online activity.
Another cool feature is that you can pull RSS feeds from your favorite sites and post their updates on your social channels. This is a good feature as you end up using other people’s content to boost the value of your social channels.
The Content Spinner feature is interesting as it teaches you the value of unique content but fails to deliver it.
The SyndWire team seems to have an ear for their audience, and there is an entire list of requested features but I’m not sure how dedicated and fast they are in providing the required features.
Cons
As with any other Social SEO automation platform, Syndwire has many things that prevent it from being an all-rounder tool for serious marketers.
The key missing feature is the lack of connectivity with Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. A small research in the history of the tool showed that they did have connectivity with Facebook but not anymore. That points to the fact that the 4000 people that use this tool are not interested in creating a valuable social activity which for a serious marketer is a huge issue. You don’t want to associate you with bad company.
Another sad omission is Engagement. Social marketing, as the name implies, is about being social. And Syndwire isn’t. That will be a deal-breaker for most marketers. No wonder Syndwire is used by only 4000 people.
The Content Spinner is a great idea with terrible implementation. Instead of helping you create actual unique content on social channels, this one is only teaching you yesterday’s tricks of rehashing the same content over and over.
Lastly, Analytics, or the lack thereof, is another deal-breaker. Without a way to track social engagement from a single Dashboard makes the $99/mo hard to justify.
Summary
Syndwire’s sales page is huge on promises. But the platform itself fails to deliver. It somehow reminds me of Mark Tompson’s RebrandApps deal. They are super-cool on selling their apps, but the apps themselves are worthless.
The lack of connectivity with the major social networks, no engagement capabilities, and no analytics adds up to a platform of little value. Everything this does can be automated with ITTT.com where you can pick pre-made connectors (or recipes as the ITTT community calls them) and link up your blog with all 32 social sites.
In a nutshell, Syndwire is a waste of your cash.
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