KUKU.io vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)

If you would like a reliable scheduling tool, KUKU.io is not the one to use. If you like to share lots of industry news, secondary content, or content from your website/blog, be aware that KUKU.io will corrupt the preview headline. You would be far better off using another scheduling tool. I have now changed to a free tool and it has all the same capabilities without this corruption issue. I also used paid ones which are equally good.

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

• It is easy to use and setup.
• Nice and clean UI
• Great support if you need help or if you have any kind of feedback.

• 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

• io corrupts headlines of articles you reshare. When you schedule a post with a URL in it, the Title of the blog post that is displayed below the picture/preview gets corrupted. So if you add any text in with the URL, that will replace the headline. I have noticed this on both LinkedIn and Twitter.
• Very poor support team. I have found that the support team at KUKU.io are extremely rude, unwilling to help you and take a long time to reply. On some occasions I have had to message them three times in the chatbot for them to even reply. None of these times has the issue been resolved. When I reported to them that KUKU.io was corrupting headlines, at first they refused to take responsibility. Finally, they admitted it was the platforms fault but said they were not doing anything at that time to fix it.
• Analytics are poor. The analytics suite in KUKU.io does not give you anything analytics for LinkedIn. The ones it provides for Twitter you can get directly from Twitter. So no value is added there.
• You cannot tag LinkedIn accounts. I use HubSpot to schedule social media posts which allows you to tag companies at least. KUKU.io cannot.

• 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.

• 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.

The support team are extremely rude and often unresponsive. All of the issues I have reported to Kuku has been responded to with "we are not looking to resolve this issue at this time." On a few occasions, they have tried to deny the issue lies with them, before evidence has been provided. Then, they have refused to fix the issue.

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.

I think Buffer is a great service, but I like the simplicity of KUKU.io and the engagement of the people working at KUKU.io

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

• Since I am using KUKU.io it saved me a ton of time I am able to spend on other things.

• 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