ARInsights ARchitect vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued)

If you have an AR program across the globe and want to track all interactions you have with them, this tool is right for you. As you can imagine the tool is only as good as the data you put in, so you do have to make it part of your work day to input the data. Say a team member leaves and you have to jump in to cover for them, you are able to see all the interactions they have had with analysts

Incentivized

If you're tasked with publishing content to social on behalf of your organization then this tool is certainly worth considering. You have quick and easy capability to schedule across multiple platforms with drag-and-drop simplicity. It ties into Salesforce's real strength of its CRM platform so you can quickly tie social activity and leads to those already in your database. And it does a good job at monitoring and analyzing brand and competitor content across multiple media types. Having said that, if you're into deep-dive and full functionality SaaS tools then this might not be for you as it covers three areas adequately, but not in enough detail or strength to make it a star performer

Incentivized

• The Event Manager function is a great way plan, invite and send agendas to your analyst attendees.
• Projects - although needing more work - is a great way to track progress during an evaluation.
• Premium content is perfect for tracking mentions, sharing reports that are relevant to your constituents and reporting.

Incentivized

• The amount of the information that radian6 can pull from multiple social platforms is absolutely phenomenal. Its just not only the pull but the way the information can be presented in dashboards was way good. It helped us understand in various aspects of our social presence.
• Multiple profiles helped us to break down the Big/Huge social buzz cloud to smaller and more manageable pieces. This helped us concentrate on the lows and helped us to plan better on turning them to highs.
• Radian6 allowed us to follow thru the crowd trends with the latest information presented in a single view. This also helped us to collect the social opinion on the product releases.
• The ease of use, one need not be an expert to start using this platform. The interface is easily understandable by anyone.
• A keyword can be edited quickly to tailor the needs and the results were quick.

Incentivized

• We would like to see some project management functions to track RFI, log follow-up actions and assign tasks inside the team.
• I'd be good to see email open state in the analyst interactions tab.
• An easier way to report insights from interactions would be hugely useful.

• Instagram Social Listening - it currently does not offer much social listening in terms of Instagram.
• Instagram Owned - It currently stops pulling once an update is "old" by their standards, even if it receives recent comments. They can force pull, but you have to work with their tech team to do so.

Incentivized

As a freelancer I am unlikely to have the budget to use ARchitect on a regular basis I would however look at it seriously if asked by a client or if I was working in an agency with a significant AR practice I would look at it seriously.

Incentivized

I spent a lot of time researching the right platform for me and our organisation (thanks to the other reviews on TrustRadius also). Having used other platforms when I found frustrations getting my everyday work done, I knew exactly what I wanted and this is why I chose Social Studio. While there have been a few hiccups, the quarterly update releases and the outstanding tech support have kept me more than happy.

It's super easy to use, and anything that I cannot figure out, their team usually helps me within hours of my asking!

• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.

The platform is rarely down

No issues with performance.

In the instances I have had issues its been a little tricky to figure things out, some of the videos are helpful but getting email responses are not great compared to online chat and I have found that the response rates have been more than a day in some instances which is not as responsive as I would like compared to other platforms.I have seen ARInsights have made a number of new hires in the area of account management so I am sure that will have improved the support provided

Incentivized

As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.

• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.

Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.

Prior to using ARchitect, we were using Salesforce. While we did have some customization added, it did not nearly have the robustness that ARchitect provides -- especially since it is designed for AR professionals. We've been using ARchitect for about 8 years and have never looked back. Some examples of vast improvements: 1. Analyst firms/bios. With Salesforce, we needed to maintain all analyst bios -- something that ARchitect does. 2. Analyst coverage. We used to track all analyst coverage by visiting multiple analyst websites and manually pasting into spreadsheets. We now not only get a feed of coverage that can be exported into Excel, but we can also customize reports by topic. 3. Reporting. Salesforce did not provide the same reporting capabilities that ARchitect provides.

Incentivized

Compared to Radian6, I found Meltwater Buzz, Simply Measured, and Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Meltwater Buzz and Radian6 are very similar products with many of the same functionalities but Buzz presents your analytics in a way that is much easier to understand. I did a two week trial with Sprout Social and absolutely loved the product but our company needed the capability to connect to Salesforce, which is available on R6 and Buzz. Simply Measured is my all time favorite but I have only used the free version so I am not completely sure how it stacks up to Radian6

• The Event Module has taken days if not weeks out of the prep process for big events.
• ARchitect is a great way to allow communication with peers, without the need for extra emails, ect, because everyone on the team can see what each other is doing and who they are talking to about which topics.

Incentivized

• Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
• Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
• If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.

Incentivized