At a time when everyone wants to expand their network and community, many users are using manual or automated pods, such as Alcapod. This tool has made a lot of noise in recent months, but today the time is serious… Alcapod is down.
June 2020, Alcapod is down
Alcapod is (was) one of the best known tools in the world in the sphere of pods. As a reminder, a pod is a group of engagement between members around the same theme that allows you to generate engagement more quickly when you publish on LinkedIn, for example.
It is by an email addressed to the Alcapod community that we learned the end of this tool. Just like that, all of a sudden. A simple email to say that “today June 29th, you won’t be able to use Alcapod anymore”.
Among the reasons for this decision, some users who would have used the tool with inappropriate content, posts with little or no moderation. This would have motivated the team to close Alcapod.
We can admire the honesty and frankness of Captain Data, at the origin of Alcapod, to stop a product with more than 10 000 users.
Why the end of Alcapod was foreseeable
Alcapod has known its hour of glory in spite of some glaring flaws. We’ll name a few of them for you:
- No pod moderation
- No incentive to write quality reviews and join quality pods
- Cloud operation which, even after uninstallation, continued to put comments for you
- Absence of “random” in the comments which always put the comments in the same order
Pods do not have a positive image with all users, and this is understandable. Alcapod therefore chose to abort the development of this product to find “cleaner” alternatives.
Podawaa, the alternative that avoids abuse
Following the end of Alcapod, there are only two alternatives left on the market Podawaa and Lempod.
Lempod works on a principle very similar to Alcapod. You get likes and comments but the quality of the content and comments is not perfectly moderated.
At Podawaa on the other hand, there is the “Podawaan Social Index” feature: an indicator (whose name is strangely reminiscent of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index) that gives a score to each user, based on different criteria evaluating his “Podawaan” quality. Among others :
- are you blacklisted by members of your pods,
- is that you get natural comments on your post,
- the size of the comments you ask for (i.e. they are real comments)
- is your ratio of comments and likes requested to this given good?
Podawaa also integrates a manual pod version and post programming, which allows you to prepare your comments on other people’s posts and see them automatically put when the post is published.
In other words, Podawaa is the ideal tool to develop your community in a qualified way to meet your goals. Cumulating likes is good, growing your audience with the right tools is better! Are you testing Podawaa?