Cision PRWeb aims to impact customer behavior by providing efficient communication tools to continuously engage with target audiences across multiple online channels including search, social media and with industry-specific partner websites, bloggers and influencers.
$99
per news release
Talkwalker by Hootsuite
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence company that bring sin data from 30+ social networks, 150 million websites, and 100 data partners to give customers a unified view of their consumers. Talkwalker is a Hootsuite solution since the 2024 acquisition.
Wire press release distribution is often a luxury purchase, especially at the price point. In my experience Cision acts as if it's destined to win everyone's business just because of its name. Too often we've found ourselves being turned off by the arrogance and taking our business (and our clients' business) to alternative companies that are happy to have us.
Talkwalker is well suited for big companies and agencies that are looking for a long-term solution to keep track of the industry and/or their brands and key competitors. While setup requires a bit of dedication (especially in terms of custom filters and tags), once it's done, the tool will give the user a lot of flexibility to analyze the conversations and find the relevant results that answer the business questions. Companies just looking for a tool to track a short time period, or simple things like Twitter hashtags, won't take advantage of the full capabilities of this tool. Therefore, they could feel frustrated when comparing the outcomes/usage versus the costs.
PRWeb is fairly easy to use to issue press releases. They have a review process that will look over your release before submission although this review is not going to catch spelling and grammatical errors.
I've seen our press releases posted on industry relevant websites thanks to the reach that PRWeb provided us.
Although I never used it because we subscribed to a different service, PRWeb allows you to create and send email blasts within their OutMarket marketing platform.
I enjoy the ability to add a quote call out in the release.
I also like that images or videos can be added to the release.
Truly global listening platform - monitor a deep range of media types from all over the world. Particularly strong in supporting competitive monitoring and analysis briefs across regions and countries. It monitors content in original language which I believe is a very strong monitoring factor.
Easy to use yet powerful dashboard visualisations - the dashboard interface is among the best I have seen. While it can accomplish many things, and under the hood is a very powerful and complex tool, the user interface is very intuitive, slick, quick and packed with all the KPIs you could want.
Customisation of the tool is a great feature. You can build your own dashboard and reporting spaces to suit your needs. You can schedule alerts from the system in a variety of outputs to keep you up to date with the latest events.
Customer support & technological advancement - the team at Talkwalker are highly proficient, always willing to support our every need, however big or small. Talkwalker aim to release around 4 software updates each year which means the platform is always full of the latest data visualisations and monitoring technologies
Having 'traditional' media monitored alongside social as well as owned media assets in one dashboard space is invaluable to help brands understand where their media footprint lies and how they perform in each media set, relative to the others.
AI - Talkwalker has introduced greater AI capabilities recently which means the capability of the tool in monitoring is ever-increasing, and the accuracy of targeting content and sentiment analysis is improving. The Visual Insights and image recognition technology is a really strong feature, and a very welcome addition to the monitoring aspect
Increasing the volume of media that can receive communication would help - going from 5,000 to 7,500 or 10,000 would be a massive help.
Providing a social media platform in which to send out either X posts, LinkedIn, and Facebook posts to media as an alternative communication would help
Increasing the number of podcasters and there contact details would help.
The system is complicated. With everything that you're able to do, it does come at the cost of simplicity. It definitely requires training and a high level of expertise to properly leverage what it can do.
The system can be slow. If you "ask" it to do too many things at once, it can get hung up and do the spin of doom.
We are unlikely to renew PRWeb because I feel that the costs outweigh the benefits of the service. For a company like ours (small business with about 60 employees) we don't have enough press that warrants monthly coverage. We may look at using PRWeb on an as needed basis, 3-4 times a year for single submissions, but that would be the extent of it. I could see PRWeb being much more beneficial for large companies that are constantly needing to issue press.
The Cision PRWeb platform is mostly intuitive. It is broken into Monitoring, Social, Insights, and Outreach sections. The way Mention Streams are set up and organized has confused employees who are new to the dashboard. Under Outreach, the Launchpad and Activities tabs are a little bit redundant and could probably be consolidated.
Talkwalker gets the job done at a basic level. It performs regular indexing of existing webpages and tracks the instances in which a particular brand or company is mentioned. Especially for being free, this is an awesome resource. However, it should be said that this product does not perform nearly at the level of the paid options.
I have only required support from PRWeb on two separate occasions and they handled my issues without any problems. I was a bit confused at first not sure if they had received my requests but shortly after I received responses and was able to move forward with my press release.
They are very helpful, but can sometimes be a little too quick and not explain things in as great a depth as we would like. They have great staff and programs, and we don't really have any other major complaints. Support is very responsive and helpful when need be.
It is not an "either-or" situation. If a company really wants to put a release out on the wire, one service might be better suited for it than the other. For when a company wants to target certain countries or vertical markets (e.g. Latin America), PR Newswire would be the proper choice.
I have yet to find another tool that would provide me with such a detailed information per query. It's such a find! Plus, I get separate emails per a search query and I'm able to archive those emails to the appropriate folders and always have a way of looking back. It's very useful for building monthly reports.
The free tool is a no-brainer. It absolutely helps ferret out mentions on social media that I wasn't aware of before.
Now, I can use the tool for clients, too, so for consultants, it can be a great way to help stay on top of what's being said about them online, as well.
Using the paid version would help delve into even more insights for your business.
