Adobe Social, incorporates technology from Context Optional and Efficient Frontier.
Adobe acquired Facebook advertising-management platform Efficient Frontier in November. Six months earlier, Efficient Frontier had acquired Facebook page-management platform Context Optional.
Adobe Social is an enterprise social platform competing with Buddy Media and Involver, enabling things like automated content marketing and social sweepstakes and competitions.
Customers tend to be medium to large…
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Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Brandwatch, from Cision (acquired February 2021) is an enterprise social intelligence platform that is designed to allow brands to listen and analyze online conversation to extract meaningful insights, inform their business decisions and understand more about the return on their marketing spend.
I used Adobe Social when I use to have my own business on social media. After many months I was having no success in finding the correct clients for my products. Using Adobe Social I was able to market and discover different ways of searching for the correct clients and later on helped my business grow.
The user interface is great and is easy to use for social media marketers of all ranges. In regard to planning and scheduling content, it allows all users with access to the capability to view all upcoming on an actual calendar. For organizational purposes, this is great and mitigates any confusion that other team members may have. The tool seems to always be updating which has its pros and cons because once you figure something out, there's a switch and you'll need to relearn how things are positioned but overall, it's not a heavy lift.
Adobe Social lacks strengths, as I believe Adobe themselves have acknowledged, given their decision not to continue support or development. But if I need to list three strengths, the first would be it can publish to some social media platforms with a success rate of over 50%. If that's a strength.
It has workflow processes, but they are over-complicated and poorly designed.
It has some basic analytics, but Adobe consultants usually recommend referring to Adobe Analytics instead. Which is great if you actually use Adobe Analytics.
Clean, beautiful visuals that can be easily incorporated into reports to be used internally and externally.
Customization-- anywhere from the queries you create to adjusting individual report widget/components this tool is very flexible.
Excellent Customer Service and support. My Brandwatch rep is always open to hearing from me for questions and often reaches out to me to check in on my status or see if I would like to participate in beta programs.
Constant innovation. It seems like Brandwatch is constantly updating and adding improvements to their platform--especially with their 2019 acquisition of Crimson Hexagon.
It would be great if Adobe scheduled video uploads for Twitter.
A time change in a social post automatically puts the post back to Level 1 of approvals. It can be a big hassle to have to start the process over for such a small change.
Adobe uses a different algorithm to measure engagement our company does. It would be great to upload your own algorithm into Adobe.
I wasn't in charge of making the actual management decision, but I would absolutely renew Adobe Social. As I mentioned, it provides strong and in-depth analytics and listening tools. The reports that it generates are very thorough and easy to read. I loved the platform and would recommend it to anyone
Brandwatch is a simple tool that is easy to learn and understand. Without any rigorous training, the team can learn to use it and interpret the results in an efficient manner. It saves a lot of work and helps the team to focus on other important time consuming tasks. I would like to continue using Brandwatch.
The reason why I give this rating is that the overall platform is simple to use. You don't need to be tech-savvy or have a vast understanding of how to work a marketing tool. It is very simple to use compared to different platforms and you learn a lot of different ways to build your business.
I've invited quite a few of my colleagues to try Brandwatch, and all of them were able to use its features with no assistance, and most of these had never used a social listening/monitoring tool before, or even a digital analytics tool! Brandwatch is not only easy to use, but filters, widgets, menus and other options are in intuitive places - it just works
Brandwatch craps out sometimes. Pages freeze, data doesn't populate for hours. It's fine if you're not in a hurry but something to keep in mind if you're working in real-time. It's not as bad as Talkwalker but it's impacted timely delivery of work for me, and one of the first things I teach when introducing the platform is the process for closing out and re-logging in to see if it unfreezes
The reason why I give this a 9 out of 10 in terms of support is because of the mobile app functionality. I have had many issues in terms of logging in and also loading pages. The app overall is easy to use but at what cost? Other than that it is great and I still enjoy Adobe Social.
The Brandwatch Consumer Research customer success team is outstanding. Every member of their team has been wildly helpful and remarkably pleasant. These people go above and beyond to ensure you have all the tools and help you need to find success on their platform. I had several calls where we discussed difficulties users where having on the platform that resulted in an overall improvement in reporting across the board. They didn't just answer our questions, they dug deeper to find root problems and helped us build out dashboards to alleviate them.
Training was long and a little confusing. While a number of features carried over, they were still covered in this elongated training. It would have been nice to have training tailored to experience level with the product.
good knowledge, great tips, although the program seems a bit disconnected. It could improve it they create more free webinars and a good content calendar and tackle little topics in each webinar. Their trainers are top notch and they know a lot about the tool but they fall a bit low on technical level understanding of how the tool actually works
The implementation was done during our POC. We had a very mixed experience here, and have had some issues arise since based on the way the tool was implemented. An Adobe employee went ahead and made a change to our account that was unauthorized (helpful for our implementation) which caused issues in on boarding another team who needed the same change, but could not get it done without costly Adobe certification
Hootsuite Enterprise is superior in many ways, but the biggest factor is probably that it is constantly evolving and adding new features, working directly with social media companies ahead of new releases. Adobe seems to have stopped developing their product.
If you're using it to monitor your brand's social presence only, or if you're in an agency and using it to monitor existing clients and provide reports to them, then this is a great tool and you're hard-pressed to find something better. But if you're wanting it more for new business and discovery, there are tools that do this much better, including Sysomos and Crimson Hexagon. So it depends on what specifically you're trying to do. My agency was already using this product when I arrived, so I did not have a choice in the matter, but I've evaluated both of these other tools. Crimson is similar enough that the slight increase in cost doesn't justify switching. Synthesio is the most expensive competitor in the market (no matter what they tell you), but you get what you pay for. If you can afford it, go with Synthesio.
Although we chose Adobe Social believing it could provide ROI metrics we could not get elsewhere, that turned out not to be the case. Site Catalyst can give us everything we need without Adobe Social
Adobe Social did not create greater efficiencies and speed up our activity within social media. In fact, it has done the oppposite. It is very cumbersome with little clear benefit.
At a high level, the biggest impact the Brandwatch Analytics has had is giving us the ability to quantify the impact of social media for our clients. In the world of social, ROI is defined and interpreted differently across clients (particularly where it's more difficult to apply traditional ROI) - so this may mean reporting on earned media for some, while for others it's measuring increasing engagements or social mentions over time.
