Ion Interactive vs. X Pro

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Incentivized

TweetDeck is ideal for complex media organisations / newsrooms where you want to keep track of several users accounts, or switch between multiple user and/or title accounts. It is perfect for those who want to follow conversations in real-time via many channels, at a glance. It is also useful for those who want to schedule tweets to provide around the clock coverage even when unmanned. Now that it paid-for is less suited to smaller organisations with tight budgets.

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

Incentivized

• TweetDeck is the best platform to schedule tweets - it is far better than the website itself. The process is remarkably easy and scheduling a day's worth of tweets takes no more than 10 minutes.
• Tracking news is very easy on TweetDeck due to being able to create multiple columns each focusing on a different subject. Columns can be created using handles, searches, hashtags, and trends, and this makes TweetDeck a great platform as a news editor.

Incentivized

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

• TweetDeck has an editing feature for scheduled posts only if there is no image attached. When a post with an image needs editing, users must instead delete the entire post and reschedule it with the edits needed.
• TweetDeck has a real-time display, however users often need to refresh the window manually to get scheduled posts to appear in the appropriate column.
• TweetDeck users can scroll side to side to view all off the types of columns selected. This functionality often leads to traveling back to a previous page unintentionally.

Incentivized

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

Incentivized

As I previously mentioned, if TweetDeck were to increase some features and integrations, cleaned up its interface, and developed a tool to measure ROI, it would remain competitive with HootSuite and Hubspot. Altogether, it is an effective tool for the job of scheduling and monitoring your impact on Twitter, it falls behind other competitors that offer a more robust solution.

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

It's a pretty easy tool to use I find a few of the columns to be a bit repetitive. If you are managing more than one account you'll start to find yourself having easily 10 plus columns all tracking all different information which creates nice track lanes to keep all that relative information in one column or "view". With the amount of data that is pushed out, if you are following a large number of accounts, it's extremely easy to lose valuable posts in your feeds. As you begin building out your columns they get the point where you only look at one or two and the rest seem to be lost. Overall, this a free tool and there are other social monitoring tools that are out there but are in the multiple thousands of dollar range

TweetDeck tends to be available for use majority of the time...however, I've had times where it would get stuck in a loop and then post my Tweet multiple times.

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

Besides posting multiple times when stuck in a loop not other real issues.

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

I've never had to contact customer support. Tweetdeck has always worked like a charm for me. And, if I have had a problem, I've simply deleted the column, then recreated it and it worked again. While it's not without its glitches every once in a great while, it's worked like a charm.

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

Easy download and launch of application.

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

Several years ago I used the Hootsuite Free service. I found Tweetdeck to be preferable because of its user interface, and greater functionality. Moreover, I recall Hootsuite bombarding me with emails that were just irrelevant. TweetDeck just does what it does, without hassle. Its UI and functionality for multiple accounts seems to be the best I've tried.

Incentivized

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized

• Positive: User-friendly and therefore easy to teach new members.
• Positive: Easy team management (when there are multiple users/managers for one channel).
• Positive impact on well being - You can take a break from social media and go on holiday even when you are working as a social media manager.

Incentivized