If you run a business or sell products online, there’s a good chance that you have one or more social media accounts to help you reach your customers.  With 3.5 billion people using social media platforms at any given time, it’s hard to imagine how brands survived without it.  Despite this, a huge number of marketers and entrepreneurs still struggle to effectively manage their social media accounts and get the best out of this incredibly useful and affordable marketing tool.  Thankfully, there is help at hand for those looking to get more from their socials and, today, I’m going to be talking about one of the good ones; HeyOrca.

What the hey is HeyOrca?

Great question!  HeyOrca is a Newfoundland based social media management tool which was created to help agencies and brands manage their social media efforts in a collaborative way.  Launched in 2015 by Joseph Teo, HeyOrca provides a whole whack of features that make social media management simple. 

Who uses HeyOrca?

HeyOrca is used by oodles of marketing agencies and brands around the world and has some pretty impressive clients including Imagine Media, Aspen Grove Marketing, Beutler Ink and Digital Ethos.  Although HeyOrca is geared towards digital agencies, its friendly pricing makes it inclusive and suitable for any brand – big or small – that needs to streamline their social media process. 

‘At WirEntsorgen, we’re all about helping people to declutter and our business relies on us being able to reach as many people as possible through social media.  Hey Orca has helped to take us from strength to strength by helping to manage our social media presence so that I can concentrate on what we do best – outstanding customer support’. Patrick Mazurkiewicz, Owner at WirEntsorgen 

How much does HeyOrca cost?

Splendidly simple, HeyOrca has just one price package – this will cost you $84 (billed annually) or $99 a month per calendar (brand you manage). Each calendar comes with unlimited users, social posts, media storage, and, up to 10 connected social media profiles.  

If you manage 5 or more brands you can bundle and save 40% off. HeyOrca also offers custom bulk pricing discounts for agencies that manage 10 or more brands.

This platform does offer a free 14 day trial, so you can take it for a test drive before committing your hard earned cash. No credit card required.

How do I get started with HeyOrca?

The good news is that this bit is pretty darn easy – here’s how to go about it: 

You’ll start by signing up for a free trial and, the process goes something like this: 

• Head on over to www.heyorca.com
• Click the “Free Trial Button” at the top of the page
• Here you’ll see a simple online form
• Fill in all the usual details including your name, your email address and the type of company you’re running
• Click onto the green ‘Register For Free’ button in the bottom left hand corner
• Choose a name for your first calendar
• Click onto the blue ‘Next’ button
• You’ll now be asked to add your social media accounts – follow the onscreen instructions from here
• And you’re done – how easy was that?

What features does HeyOrca have?

HeyOrca has a whole slew of features for its members to play with and, here’s some of ‘em: 

Social Media Calendar

The star of the show, HeyOrca’s visual social media calendar allows you to quickly and easily put together schedules for your social media posts and content and then share them with others with just a clickety click. 

The Post Editor allows you, your clients, or stakeholders to see exactly how the post will appear on the social networks you are posting to. You can create a post on one social network and quickly replicate it across multiple platforms and edit the copies as you please. This is a huge time saver!

HeyOrca allows you to schedule posts directly to the following social networks:

1. Facebook
2. Instagram (via Buffer Integration or mobile app)
3. LinkedIn
4. Twitter
5. Google My Business
6. Pinterest
   

Andrew Martins, senior associate at LVBet.com says, ‘Social media is everything for us as it allows us direct contact and engagement with our customers. Hey Orca is probably the single best investment that I’ve ever made for my business as it allows us to make sure that our posts are consistent and professional’. 

Client Approval and Feedback

Users are able to share scheduled posts with their clients or managers for approval and feedback. The tool allows approvers to provide comments directly on the post and tag members of their team. They can also approve or deny posts from within the editor. 

Scheduled posts that require approvals will not be published unless approval is given by the assigned approver(s). 

HeyOrca also allows you to schedule automated reminders for approvals, to ensure a post never misses its deadline.

Reporting

From the comfort of your dashboard, you can be the master of all that you observe with HeyOrca’s straightforward reporting. The reporting tool provides you with visual, easy-to-understand graphs on key metrics you and your clients will want to know about.

HeyOrca also allows you to export reports, in PDF or XLS format, at the touch of button to share with your stakeholders.

“HeyOrca’s reports have proved to be especially useful to my marketing team. Since we’re a company with a strong emphasis on data-driven marketing methods, we made good use of the metrics provided by the tool. We are in the travel industry so it’s important to keep one’s ear to the ground.

The reports are straightforward and provided in an easy-to-digest way. Seeing that I’m a visual person, I like to have some sort of a graphical representation of data, as it makes it far more clear to me.” 

Jack Ptak, CEO & Founder at krakowdirect.com 

Additional Features

HeyOrca is constantly collecting feedback from its customers to develop new ways to help them save time and fight burnout!  Some of the unique features you’ll find in HeyOrca are:

1. Canva Integration – allows you to edit existing Canva graphics or create new ones directly from the HeyOrca post editor
2. Facebook Creator Studio Integration – this feature allows you to publish posts directly to Facebook creator studio where you can schedule paid ads. HeyOrca is currently working on developing a post promotion feature directly within the platform.
3. Instagram Grid Preview – see exactly how your scheduled posts will appear on your brand’s or clients brands’ Instagram profiles. 
4. Event Strips – similar to Gcal, you can use event strips to highlight campaigns or recurring content within your calendar.

‘We use Canva to develop creatives for our word finding games all the time. HeyOrca’s integration with Canva saves our team time and allows us to create high quality creatives for our users.’

Neal Taparia, Founder at Unscrambled Words

HeyOrca Pros And Cons

So, now that I’ve given you an idea of what HeyOrca is all about, it’s time to take a look at the ever popular pros and cons of this tool: 

Hey Pros

HeyOrca has a fair bit going for it and, the following are some of the major pros of this tool: 

Price – Simple and straightforward, HeyOrca’s price of $84 a month (billed annually) is pretty reasonable for the number of features you get for your cold hard cash. Unlike other competitors, you don’t have to pay extra to access collaboration features and add users to collaborate with.

Easy peasy – Each and every one of HeyOrca’s features has been really well thought out and is really easy to use, even if tech isn’t your thing. 

Collaboration – Connecting and sharing literally couldn’t be easier than with HeyOrca. This is where HeyOrca really stands out.

Updates – HeyOrca is incredibly proactive when it comes to updating the system and offering users lots of shiny new toys to play with. They put a heavy emphasis on designing new features based on their customers’ inputs.

Support – HeyOrca’s support team is one of the most reactive that I’ve come across in a long time and, as a bonus, they’re super friendly too. HeyOrca subscriptions come with free support and unlimited 1-on-1 training for you, your team, and clients.

One stop option – HeyOrca provides a one stop option for managing multiple clients and social content. 

Hey Cons

Yes, there are a few cons – Hey, nobody’s perfect.  Thankfully, there aren’t too many of these but, here they are: 

Slow at Times – The interface can, at times, be a little slow which is a bit frustrating.

Media Library – While this is a great feature, it does seem subject to frequent breakdowns. 

Integrations – At present, HeyOrca is missing a few integrations which would be really useful including direct publishing to Instagram stories (they have a mobile app to workaround this). 

Notifications – Occasionally, HeyOrca fails to send a notification when a client comments on a post which can make effective communication a little difficult. 

Are there any alternatives to HeyOrca?

Why, yes there are!  I think I’ve painted a pretty great picture of HeyOrca, however, if you’re looking for something a little different, here are some decent alternatives: 

Hootsuite

A comprehensive platform for social marketing and selling, Hootsuite has plenty of bells and whistles to help take your business to the next level across a number of social media platforms.  Hootsuite offers scheduling, engagement and the sharing of insights across teams.  It doesn’t, however, come cheap as Hootsuite will set you back £520 per month for 5 users and up to 35 social profiles. 

Sprinklr Modern Engagement

A thoroughly modern platform, Sprinklr helps customers to become social at scale by managing up to 35 channels and consolidating point solutions with a unified platform which increases engagement as well as streamlining management tasks. While its offerings are there for all to see, Sprinklr’s prices are a little more mysterious and are only available on request. 

Opal

A flexible marketing calendar and management tool, Opal offers visibility and alignment marketing for communications teams and, its clients include some big hitters including Ikea, AirBnB and Starbucks. Opal’s prices are available on request – and we suspect that they’re likely to be on the pricey side. 

Falcon.io

A handy little online tool, Falcon.io allows users to discover trends, track performance, publish content and engage with customers.  Falcon.io can be yours from $129 per month. 

Conclusion

So, the million dollar question – Is HeyOrca any good? In a word, yes.  They’ve truly earned their 4.8/5 stars on G2.

In a few more words, I’ll explain why: 

To begin with, you do get a lot of bang for your buck with HeyOrca, which is important for a lot of SMEs.  The price is really reasonable considering the number of features on offer, as you’ll have notice in our alternatives section.  While price isn’t, of course, everything, it’s still pretty important. 

And about those features – HeyOrca promises to be a whole social media management system and it absolutely delivers.  Even those with a large social media presence would be hard pressed to come up with a list of features that they need and which HeyOrca doesn’t have. 

Finally, this is a really straightforward and easy to use system which means that anyone, regardless of their techpertise, can get on with straight away.  The entire system has been built in a way which just shows good common sense and logic. 

If you’re after a social media management tool – and you don’t want to have to buy a whole load of extra plugins and apps to go with it then, hey, trust me, HeyOrca is the one for you.