Everyone wants to be Instafamous or a Twitter celeb, including businesses. Growing your brand on social media platforms extends your reach deep into the community and begins a two-way conversation, unlike traditional marketing. There are many tools available and more are created everyday to take full control of your social media marketing strategy. TakeOff is one of those tools. It is a "smart" Instagram and Twitter post-scheduling app that can calculate the best time to post. Their algorithm calculates the time based on your activity and that of your followers so each time is personalized for every user. TakeOff was released in the fall of 2014 and has a steady growth of users.
Likes
- Amazing UX and UI design. TakeOff is very easy to pick up and use, even for absolute beginners.
- Automatic timing based on a user and their followers’ activity.
- Also has a manual over ride for those who want to have more control over their posting schedule.
- Unlimited Instagram and Twitter accounts can be managed from one device.
- Available on iOS and Android. No one likes an OS exclusive app!
- Popular hashtag suggestions
Dislikes
- TakeOff doesn’t automatically post your scheduled posts. A notification is sent to you when it’s time. This is counterintuitive to the entire point of the app, why schedule an app if you have to be there to post it anyway.
- The hashtag symbol isn’t available on the first keyboard as it is in Instagram. This makes it more time consuming to add a lot of hashtags to your Instagram posts.
- TakeOff’s website says there is a Photo Search feature but it doesn’t actually exist in the app…
Business Use
Car and Driver Magazine’s social team used TakeOff as one of their many social media tools. Keyword, used. Their initial experience was great. Setting up the app is very easy, getting posts scheduled is a breeze, and personalized post timing is a social media marketer’s dream. The major downfall, and one of my previously stated Dislikes, is the fact that the app won’t automatically post when the time arrives. A lot of other popular social media management apps (Buffer and Sprinklr just to name a couple) allow for this and once you have used that feature once, there is no turning back.
Final Word
It pains me to say this but I cannot fully recommend TakeOff. It is very well designed and has some really cool features but it just can’t keep up with its competitors.
