Meltwater vs. Mention

Meltwater is well-suited for agencies that have an engagement team who is looking to service a variety of client needs such as social media reporting, public relations outreach, and community management. If you're looking to have a platform serve just one need, you can still use Meltwater but will get more bang for your buck if you are needing a variety of tools.

Incentivized

I would ask if they have ever used a software like Mention before, if not, I would totally suggest they start with it. It's easy to use, easy to set up and while it may be confusing at first, it's probably the cheapest and most effective. My suggestion to a new marketer or first-time user of this kind of software would be Mention.

Incentivized

• Media research - you can search for relevant publications and journalists to add to your media list.
• Earned media coverage - you can search for coverage of your brand and find news stories that also include data that may be useful (how many people did the story reach for example).
• Building media lists - if you have no current existing list, you can build and export one in Excel for example.

Incentivized

• Mention has nice support and implementation function. They will do some of the harder work for you (e.g. refining your alerts).
• It helps us to easily track and rank influencers, which improves the effectiveness of our Public Relations (PR).
• You can filter and refine alerts e.g. by language. This is useful if you want to break into new markets.

Incentivized

• The dashboards are not user-friendly, customizable (color, font size, etc.), or worthy of presenting to a client. All of the insights from a dashboard get pulled from the platform and placed into a more client-friendly presentation.
• Paywalls for certain publications connected to who-knows-what. DowJones racket limits media monitoring capabilities and results in manual searches for a growing number of publications.
• TVeyes, the broadcast monitoring arm of the media monitoring capabilities, just needs TLC and to become more client-facing. Currently, the links produced to share clips look sketchy, and they have a relatively short shelf life.

Incentivized

• Yes, I just said it is clean and easy to use, but there is always room for improvement in even the most perfect software. I would personally love to see the ability to custom message options a bit more or just customize the look and feel of your dashboard.
• Bugs. Mention works great 95% of the time. The other 5%, you may run into major crashes or see mentions that you cleared coming back, etc., but nothing that is a deal breaker or unexpected with a tool like this. Worth noting nonetheless!
• Better plans. This is a small issue, but I wish the lower plans has some basic reporting.

Incentivized

Meltwater works well for our organization and has allowed us to meet our internal goals. We are always open to new products and services that may be able to provide similar or better features; however, our experience has been that many of Meltwater's competitors are not up to the task.

Incentivized

Once you get some basic training it's pretty easy to use. I would like to see training manuals, or instructional videos to help me explore features I'm not currently using.

Mention works quickly and its user interface is easy to use. Alerts update regularly and I've never noticed any lag. It integrates with our CRM via Zapier, but this is not something which we use yet. The only thing I would say is that it takes time for Mention to reach its full potential. It only starts to rank influences from when you set up the alert, so it can take a few weeks to build a map of your influencers.

Incentivized

Our account rep at Meltwater went dark for a long time. Then, a couple of weeks ago, our new account manager reached out to set up a meeting. Apparently, they had a big shakeup in the company, and there were some personnel changes. Our new account rep was great in discussing the platform's capabilities that were available to us and even offered to schedule a follow-up meeting with his technical team to introduce our new social media team members to the platform and how it could help them with their jobs.

Incentivized

Mention always responded promptly and gave excellent support. Any problem we had with the software, from login trouble to broken features were addressed quickly. There was once a problem with our quota, where we were unable to see results we should have been able to see. We sent an email, and within an hour, the situation was resolved!

Incentivized

Again, really in-depth and helpful for a program that is really easy to use.

Walked step by step through program. Very informative on a program that doesn't require much training.

You are only allowed 15 users, so make sure you've identified who will have access to use the tool.

I was looking for a full-service option. I did some research. What really sold me was the presentation. They offered products that were helpful, and I wasn’t even aware of them. It is more expensive than the other products that are out there, but you get more. The other companies are good, but Meltwater Media Intelligence is more full service.

Incentivized

Currently, there are no other tools available with the features that Mention has possible according to our knowledge and experience. We firmly believe that Mention has placed themselves in a category all of their own. In the ten years, our company has been around. We have yet to come across any other companies like Mention. Pretty sure there may be another company or competition. None like Mention in our opinion are available, however.

Incentivized

• As a PR firm, we rely on the media databases that [Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform] supplies to deliver the media exposure that they expect from us.
• We utilize their tracking of media hits for our overall reporting to our clients.
• Both of these are advantageous in helping us to not only keep our existing clients happy but also to gain new clients (and, in turn - revenue), as well.

Incentivized

• Mention has had a positive impact on my business because it gives people the impression that I was following them, even if I might not have been. It makes me appear active on all social media platforms, even if I ONLY look at my mentions each day!
• Because I have only used the free plan but have benefitted greatly, I would say that my ROI is fantastic!
• The only negative impact that Mention has is that I do get a daily email in my inbox, and it is one more thing to check. However, it is worth the time.

Incentivized