Rignite Review

By Lauren | October 20, 2014 | 1 Comment

Recently I had an account manager over at Rignite reach out to me to test their social media management software. Before hearing from them I had never heard of the software, but being a social media professional that still has yet to find a software that does everything I want it to do, and more, I thought I’d give it a whirl.

The software itself is relatively well priced for users. Starting at $28.00/month per user with their basic account which allows for up to 30 social profiles, which is by far way more than any other softwares “basic” account has offered (at least that I’ve seen).

The software is broken down by a few large icons on the side. Sort of like Hootsuite but bigger icons that have the label of what you’re clicking right underneath. (See photo)These icons are broken down to the following:

Campaigns:
One of the coolest features of this software that I haven’t seen done as effectively or at all in other programs is the campaigns tab. This tab allows you to create a campaign that can fall under one of these 4 categories/goals:

– promote an event, blog, or content
– boost engagement
– grow your fans & followers
– increase sales

There are also sub-categories that fall under each of these. Once you select the campaign you want to run, it will then walk you through each step of setting up a campaign, like choosing the network, setting the details, pre-writing all your posts, and scheduling. You will then be able to track the campaign easily by reach, engagement, link clicks, etc. from the dashboard.

The one dislike I had about this is that it only allowed for you to pre-schedule 3 types of social posts. You could repeat these as much as you wanted but you could only have 3 unique tweets for example.

Monitor:
This is where your main streams live. They are kept in seperate tabs that you create based on what you want to monitor. This can range from your feed, specific keywords or hashtags, specific accounts you’d like to track, blog feeds, plus a watch list that can monitor your “influencers” or “VIPs”, which I’ll explain later in this review.

The monitor dashboard is good size, organized, and even ranks posts by sentiment along the side with happy faces. Although I noticed mostly all the posts in my Twitter feeds were a neutral face, so I’m not sure how affective this really is. You can also easily flag someone to your watch list or VIP list by a simple click, sort of like how you would favourite a tweet on Twitter.

The one thing that I didn’t like about the feed was that when you had more then 4 things you were tracking, the rest of the streams would fall into a list icon along the tabs (see phonto). Which is a tad hidden. In this case, I like hootsuite better just because you seamlessly scroll left and right to your additional streams if need be.

Another neat feature of this feed allows you to click on any post within your feed and you will see a mini profile of that user appear to the right. This will show their states, and recent interactions/posts. There is also a tag cloud to the right which I haven’t quite figured out the point of/how it works. Other than when you click on a tag it brings up posts within that feed that use those keywords.

Cases:
Although I didn’t personally test these out while trying out rignite. Cases are used to assign specific things to your team. For example: if there is a tweet that requires a response, and you don’t know the answer but know someone else on your team would, you can assign the case to them. Rignite will automatically send you reminders to inform you a case has been signed to you and is waiting to be solved.

Schedule:
The scheduling tab displays nicely in a calandar view, showing your posts and which account the post is going to and allowing you to easily drag and delete posts as you please. I really like this feature as it appears more organized then just a stream of posts and allows you to see where you’re missing content. You can also draft posts and pause a post if you are needing approval of something from a team, etc.

Note: You can also view in lists if you prefer.

Teams:
Since I was just using this personally I didn’t get to play with this option too much, but from what I can tell you can easily start chats, include attachments etc. with your team members. Making it easy to keep all communication in one place.

Forums:
Rignite’s support team referred to forums as a place for ideas and content, versus chat that is just used to communicate quickly with your team. I don’t overlly see a use for this section, but perhaps someone with a larger social team may. Especially if they are trying to put together a blog post or something that may involve more peoples buy-in or opinion.

Dashboard:
The dashboard is where the analytics are kept. As far as shortfalls this is definitely Rignites, unfortunately. You can see some snapshots of your general analytics for profiles like fan base, impressions, demographic, activities (likes, RT, etc.), you can also track your links, plus your campaign impact here.

I find that this dashboard is clearly organized and laid out, very infographic-like but lacking more data to really dig into analytics.

Contacts:
This is your virtual address book of your influencers and VIPs that I had mentioned earlier in this post. This allows for you to easily browse through these people, monitor their stats, and view their posts, all in one place! This is great for tracking competitors easily.

Gallery:
This is another great feature. The gallery allows you to create different albums. These albums can then easily be accessed when you go to compose a message and need to attach an image. This saves you from keeping all these images somewhere on your computer, and allows for you to easily post and house your photos from anywhere and any device!

Last but not least one of the most important features to many is the “compose message” feature which falls in the top bar and can be accessed from any page. When clicked it expands to a regular message box, allows you to choose from a template you may have saved, and then lets you schedule or publish right then and there. Very similar to other software but in my opinion, more visually appealing.

As for support, they offer a great help centre filled with videos, and a “chat” area to submit your question and receive a question right there within the software within the hour. This is much better then some of the other softwares that you must travel off the site to get to someone.

Overall Rignite is a great tool. I went in with low expectations as it’s not a platform that you hear about as much as some of its competitors. My main suggestions that would need to change in order for me to make the switch is to offer better analytic tools, and improve the navigation between the streams in the “monitor” dashboard. Other then that this is a great and cost efficient competitior to some of the bigger names out there!

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