Review: mLabs, the Brazilian platform simplifying social media management

Contxto – Nowadays, social media is an essential part of most business structures, regardless if you’re a corporation or startup. With more than 94 thousand users, mLabs from Brazil has developed the perfect platform for community managers and digital marketing agencies.

What is mLabs all about?

Through mLabs, users can schedule posts, control their creative process and generate reports. All the while, they can be in constant communication with clients.

When it comes to social media management platforms, previously I’ve used Hootsuite and Buffer. Compared to those two, I think mLabs has much more to offer. 

However, the only but I would give the platform is that it’s currently only available in Portuguese, which can obviously be a hindrance. The good news is that mLabs is already developing a language preference feature. 

While I don’t speak or understand much of Portuguese, I still had an interesting time getting to know the platform. Here are some of my conclusions about mLabs. 

UX/UI

I usually leave my thoughts about UX/UI for the end of the review. However, today I’d like to give mLabs an honorable mention in this category.

From my experience, the platform is very easy to use and understand. The design makes the site very instinctive and I had no trouble whatsoever using it. Even though I don’t speak Portuguese.

That’s right, the whole platform is in Portuguese but as I said, it’s intuitive and fairly easy to use. If you aren’t sure of something, my recommendation would be to simply copy the text on Google Translate. This should suffice for the language barrier. 

Since I was able to enjoy and use the platform in a completely different language, I’m pretty sure others will as well.

Getting started 

First things first. Create your account using your email or Facebook. Then, specify whether you’ll be using mLabs for your own personal brand, as a freelance community manager, or as a marketing agency. Finally, designate how many brand accounts you’d like to manage.

Afterward, an informative video on how to get started will pop up on your screen. 

I just have to say that these videos are extremely useful. Logistically, you’ll find out everything you need to know with a step-by-step process. Informative videos are actually available throughout the platform to explain various features, which certainly add some brownie points to its overall UX.

While there are many helpful resources, once again the language becomes an issue in the videos. Fortunately, these clips indicate where to click exactly and visualize the subjects, so it’s not too much of a problem.

Here’s my pro-tip: when watching the video, I suggest opening mLabs in another tab. This way, you can discover the site’s true potential while following the video.

Dashboard

On the dashboard page is where you have an all-encompassing snapshot of your social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Whatsapp. It even provides Google Analytics for additional monitoring.  

Within these tabs, you will see the number of likes, followers, views, etc. associated with the social media account. All relevant social platforms and their real-time performance or ratings easily manageable over the mLabs platform.

If your company suddenly gets a LinkedIn, you can register additional social media accounts from the dashboard. It’s a pretty simple process. The only thing you need to do is write down the username and password for each of them, then select the brand category and subcategory. 

In my opinion, the best part about this is you can compare yourself directly to other competitors. Just write down their account and mLabs will prepare a report. But more on that later. 

Note: When linking any account, mLabs asks you to modify the URL of the social media page with /socialmlabs at the end of it.  

Schedule posts

When scheduling posts with mLabs, the first thing you must do is choose between clients in case you have more than one. From there, you create the post that’s then uploaded to selected social media platforms.

During this phase, users can create hashtags or even save them for quick access in the future. Better yet, photo-editing light correction, filters, as well as image resizing, are all possible with mLabs. 

After you’ve got everything set up, that’s when it’s time to schedule the post. Another great feature is that you get to choose different posting times for each of the social media platforms. Pretty practical, don’t you think? 

Calendar

In the calendar section, users get an overview of all scheduled posts. It also showcases the current phase of posts, whether it be a draft, scheduled, posted, or canceled. 

The nice thing about this feature is that you get to see the entire workflow and progress. Based on this, you’re likely to quickly spot any adjustments that should be made to the scheduling strategy. 

Inbox

Get every message sent to you over social media or from clients forwarded to your mLabs inbox. This is a great feature in terms of community management. mLabs facilitates the messaging process by synchronizing different inboxes from different social media platforms all in one place.

Of course, you can also choose to manage inboxes separately, whatever you prefer. On top of that, there’s no need for scrolling through a never-ending list of messages. Simply choose to view the pending unanswered messages and voila.

While using mLabs, I linked my Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp and LinkedIn accounts. From my mLabs inbox, however, my LinkedIn and Twitter messages never showed up. I don’t know why this happened, but it sure would have been cool to have seen all of my messages in one place. Maybe next time.

Feed

Technically, mLabs provides a feed section to users, allowing them to manage various account feeds over one unified platform. This feature is very much like Hootsuite or Buffer. Nevertheless, the only platforms I could add to my feed were Instagram and Facebook. 

My number one recommendation to the mLabs team is to make sure that all social media platforms function over every part of the platform, whether that be the feed, inbox, calendar, dashboard, etc.

If the team managed to improve some of these inconsistencies, I think mLabs could definitely level up the already great user experience. 

Workflow

Personally, I think the Workflow tab is one of the best things mLabs has to offer. Especially if you work at a digital marketing agency where there are multiple minds working together.

On this tab, you effectively visualize the content creation process to ensure that assignments get done on time. Like Trello, users can designate people to certain tasks, such as posting a story, publishing a Facebook status, etc. In the process, this optimizes time and resources.

Thanks to this feature, users can rest assured that their marketing team is performing well and making progress. The only thing that’s necessary is to create a Brief with relevant post info. 

First, choose the client for whom the publication will be made. Select the channels where you want the article posted and create a title. Similarly, you can add some tags, the date and posting time.

Finally, add a brief description of what the post should look like and assign someone to lead its execution. Once everything is set, you can clearly mark the stages of progress for the respective tasks at-hand.

Adding images come first, followed by text, and then send it over for review. That’s when the boss looks over the content before sending it over to the client for their final seal of approval. Everything will re-schedule automatically once an assignment has been completed.

If by any chance any modifications should be done, either the person in charge of internal approval or the client can send their observations directly to the one making the post. All within mLabs’s. There’s no need for using other platforms!

Here’s a quick video provided by mLabs on how the Workflow feature works.

Track progress and create Reports

Tracking and creating progress reports is essential for digital marketers and their clients. Knowing this, mLabs makes this task simple and practical.  

To facilitate this, mLabs provides customized graphs for you to track your progress. Review everything from likes and followers, monthly growth, as well as audience characteristics. Along those lines, you can also analyze views per city, look at the most popular posts, negative feedback, successful hashtags, etc.

Nevertheless, comparing yourself directly to competitors is one of the greatest tools and information provided by mLabs. 

Final thoughts

Overall, I can 100 percent say I loved the service mLabs has to offer. As a content creator, it’s most definitely useful and worth the potential investment.

My only suggestion would be to make every feature available for every social media platforms. Like I’ve also said, more languages would be helpful, but thankfully mLabs is already working on it. 

By the way, my scheduled post turned out great over mLabs. Everything posted correctly at the scheduled date and time on the selected social media channel. Hands down, I encourage everyone managing social media accounts to sign up for the seven-day free trial.

-CZ