Aspire.io vs. Meltwater

I used Aspire to find influencers for my fashion business and most of the influencers who signed up for my project were unreliable and did not fulfill their contract terms. For example, of 5 influencers I sent products to, only one completed the work that was agreed upon under the Terms. The others received a $195 product and disappeared, even though we signed a contract called Terms that is monitored by Aspire. The main downfall with Aspire is that it doesn't have a system in place to control this. For instance, they don't have a way for brands to leave a review for influencers and they don't block bad influencers (many just want free product) from applying for future projects. Aspire doesn't take responsibility for anything. What is the point of paying money to Aspire if they don't vet their influencers and control the quality of influencers who use their platform?

Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.

Incentivized

• Account Reps are personable and easy to work with!
• Wide-range of database of influencers
• Easy navigate in platform

Incentivized

• Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
• Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
• Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.

Incentivized

• Filtering Messages - things seem to get cluttered easily
• "Deleting" people in campaigns you don't want to work with instead of dismissing

Incentivized

• The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
• Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
• TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.

Incentivized

Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.

Incentivized

Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.

I have bi-weekly calls with my AspireIQ rep which has been very helpful. Anytime I have a question, notice a bug, etc, she is quick to respond.

Incentivized

Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.

Incentivized

Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.

Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.

You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.

We used to use TapInfluence but we found the selection of influencers to choose from to be limited - we could not manage conversations in the platform

Incentivized

I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.

Incentivized

• Making our brand more fun!
• While our account is "small" we believe investing in influencers has broadened our brand and gotten in front of people we didn't have the capability of

Incentivized

• As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
• We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
• Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.

Incentivized