Google Business Profile vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)

The great advantage of Google My Business is that any business that complies with the privacy and authentication policy requirements can access all the functionality tools that help promote the business website through the referral system, exchange of opinions with other users and search engine optimization (SEO).

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

• Google My Business offers us an alert system in our work email, where we receive notifications when there is a new comment or review of our company. This alert system helps us to be aware of each of the opinions written by each client who has received our services, in order to be able to respond to each of them in record time.
• Google My Business gives me a complete visualization of the clicks, location of the searches of my company and the visits that my business file has received. This visualization allows me to control access and measure the traffic that my business listing is generating in conjunction with the Google Maps service.
• The update of my company file is done in real time and immediately. I don't have to wait several minutes for my company file to update. When I make a change to my company information, the changes are shown immediately to all clients who consult that business card.

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

• Like most Google products UX / usability is often lacking whilst feature set strong
• Changing a locations address can be difficult with support hard to access
• Clients can add photos, if badly shot / composed these can be detrimental to your brand.

Incentivized

• 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

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.

Google Business Profile is very user friendly for the users and well as the customers of the company. The customers have an easy time finding the information they need and posting and viewing reviews

Incentivized

• 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.

Whether it is technical or customer support, Google My Business excels and suffers in the exact same ways that all other branches of Google do. While you'll eventually figure out the issue, the sheer magnitude of the company comes with expected hurdles, wait times, and support you'd come to expect from other large companies.

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.

Google is the most powerful SERP and has much more robust features than Bing Places. Users also statistically trust Google more than Bing and it provides much more authority in the search space. The good news is that Bing Places can be synched with Google My Business which is great and convenient for business owners. It's just another alternative for businesses and I highly recommend that all businesses have an account with both Bing Places and Google My Business for optimal performance.

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

• Generate organic traffic
• Promotion of our business and services locally
• Increase visibility and ranking by Google Search
• Collecting customer reviews
• Another way to promote our business by sharing content directly to Google
• Good analytics
• Adds credibility to our business and brand

• 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