Wildfire Interactive (Discontinued) vs. PLANOLY vs. Sysomos, now part of Meltwater

The transition to Google has been painful - key contacts are no longer available.

Planoly is perfect for managing social media accounts for business or public figures. It would work great for personal use as well but maybe wouldn't be as necessary. For business purposes, it changes the game! Having something that is easy to teach colleagues to use is one of the most important features I looked for when choosing a social media management platform

Incentivized

Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload

Incentivized

• Facebook tab implementation. Allows you to easily create and produce functioning social tabs on your brands FB page.
• Add voting, sweepstakes, poll functionality to your website. Easily implement these campaigns to increase user engagement and TOS.

• Grid view
• AI Caption generator
• Auto post feature

Incentivized

• Ad-hoc research. During planning phase of a campaign it is a helpful tool to understand the marketplace, key influencers and topics that engage a target demographic.
• Post-event hashtag analysis. Rapid generation of reporting on efficacy of a campaign, key voices, topics that resonated, viral reach and more.
• User interface. Friendly and accessible enough to minimize training needs and enable decentralized access, though we have found some hand-holding is still required to get the most out of the platform.

Incentivized

• More customization - Would like to have the ability to edit more without coding.

• overall not very many points I would add for improvement

Incentivized

• It does not provide a visual for volume over time.
• The visuals aren't excellent, and would require an export to create better looking graphics.
• The interface isn't intuitive and sometimes requires clicking around to find things that seem like they should be under a different title.

Incentivized

Our initial contract with Wildfire Whitelabel was for $30,000/year, as we progressed we found several alternatives for significantly less. We used this to our advantage to lower the second year to $17,000 with the limitation in the level of support (they call this their "core" subscription). Support has been quite bad.

During our contract, we also asked for quotes on some custom work, but never managed to get an answer (or actual quote). Now two years into our contract, the limitations and lack of development are enough for us to find a different solution. Newcomers to the market like Rafflecopter, WooBox and PunchTab are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price

There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.

Very easy to use, almost anyone can learn how to build a comprehensive promotion.

PLANOLY is super easy to use. We just need to connect our Instagram account and start working in just a few clicks

Incentivized

The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction

I have never been kicked out of Wildfire service. Always up and running.

Not really an availability issue, but concurrency licensing rules mean that only one user can be logged in at a time.

Easy to perform tasks and quick to upload changes to your promotions.

This has not been an issue. It is actually beating TweetDeck when we are tagged within a post that TweetDeck is monitoring.

Phone and email support were always available to us when we needed it.

The support team was instantly responsive and were always happy to answer even the simplest software question. I knew that my clients would be in good hands should I not be available for any scheduling question through the support team. Everything was always impeccably handled in a timely manner! 100% satisfaction.

Incentivized

Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."

Incentivized

Gave me a thorough rundown on everything the software does. Sometimes it is difficult to run through it all over the phone/internet, but I was able to figure it out myself.

We had a kick-off training with the whole team where they walked us through the functionality. This was a pretty effective and comprehensive training.

Simple to use and very effective in increasing user engagement on both social channels and website. Noticeably helped raise TOS.

Implementation was so easy I dont even remember it!

Incentivized

Wildfire was a merely an adequate social media tool when it existed as a standalone, but it just couldn't compete against other players like Sprout, Falcon, and Sprinklr.

Incentivized

I have tried an AI tool called Vocable and used Google Sheets to plan my content. PLANOLY is better because of the visual grid feature. However, vocable is better in terms of the variety of content. With Vocable, we can create text content for Instagram, YouTube, and Linkedin, Product pages, SEO meta titles, descriptions, email newsletters, Blog posts etc. However, PLANOLY is only limited to Instagram and Pinterest.

Incentivized

We've used Sprout Social & Hootsuite in the past -- and they all stack up pretty evenly. Sysomos has the same features as Sprout or Hootsuite, except their reports and analytics are a little more detailed. Hootsuite has a better social media management software and dashboard though

Incentivized

• As with any social media management tool, there is a savings on labor hours (rather than doing the manual work)
• Aggregating all content into one system creates efficiencies for content teams

Incentivized

• It allowed us to engage with potential customers for clients in an easy way
• Our follower count went up by a steady 100 followers per week
• Our numbers for viewers on videos and IG Lives doubled

Incentivized

• Lowered costs and overhead when Expion got introduced as we now use one centralized solution for all of our social media work
• We can finally calculate ROI with ease and understand our campaign performance through proper tracking and analytics
• Competition tracking was never easier

Incentivized