Echobox Social vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued)

Echobox Social is well suited to publishers and media organisations who are publishing daily online content that needs sharing across social platforms. It works best if your social media objective is driving traffic to your articles/website. It would be suitable for both small and large organisations, as it allows multiple users with different access.

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

• Echobox automation is invaluable; the fact that it can intelligently automatically schedule articles within seconds of these being published on our website saves us a huge amount of time
• I find the AI message option particularly useful when rescheduling content. Although it does not always pick out the best quote, most of the time it does a good job and again saves a lot of time
• Having the option to schedule content immediately as well as in a specific time-slot or day is also very useful

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

• Since I'm Brazilian, and our whole team is based in Brazil, would be great if the whole platform was translated for Portuguese. There are no many English speakers in Brazil, to be honest. That would make it easier
• Tik Tok. Would be nice if somehow Echobox could provide their AI for Tik Tok Users

• 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

Because I am totally satisfied with Echobox service. I find it balanced between the service itself and its cost. Compared to its competitors, it is, without a doubt, the best product for small publishers. It only lacks in a greater and more efficient management of statistics which, at the moment, is absent. I will definitely renew Echobox!

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.

Echobox Social's user interface is straightforward to navigate and even members of our team who are not necessarily social media specialists can step in when needed. The schedule queue is very easy to understand, meaning different team members can see what content is scheduled to be posted. When trying to edit the automation settings, each feature is well explained if you hover over the question mark button.

• 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.

When there have been problems, they’ve usually been resolved very quickly. Some issues have occurred such as not being able to download images or posts not going out when the service has crashed, but they’re also very open to feedback. The option to download pictures loaded into the feed stories was my suggestion; saving us time creating new images and getting the posts out quickly

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.

You just have to keep in mind that it can take a day or two to have the set up of an account all done.

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.

Echobox AI function (the ability to decide when is the best time to share a post) is a [game-changer] and also the UI is cleaner and easier to use. I found Hootsuite confusing and complicated. It has too many windows and also doesn't pull the articles automatically. There is no comparison really, Echobox is miles ahead.

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

• Higher click-through rates on articles shared to social.
• An increased volume of social posts across all pages through automation, leading to more eyes on more articles.
• Automation has led to more time for other tasks.
• Digital subscriptions have increased steadily since implementing Echobox.

• 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