Meltwater vs. Tailwind

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

Tailwind can schedule your Pinteret pins, but it's an expensive platform to do this, and given it seems to miss many, it does not even do this well. Further, they continue to get you to reconnect, so it is cumbersome and poorly designed. We used it only because our vendors wanted it, but it's been a total waste of money given how poorly designed it is, how buggy it is and how useless the other so-called services they provide are. Go somewhere else as there are way better solutions as we have now found.

• 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

• The extension for Chrome and Safari has been EXTREMELY helpful. Through research and continuing education, we frequently see information we'd like to share with our audience and the extension has made this so easy.
• The SmartLoop feature is great for times when we get busy and may not have the time to add new things to our queue. I know even if I had zero time to devote to social media that day, I was still active and getting information to our candidates.
• Interface is extremely user friendly. A lot of time these programs that are supposed to help us and bring ease to our workload are so complicated and intense that they cause more stress than they relieve. This is not true with Tailwind. Tailwind is easy to use and truly does take a load of stress off us as an organization.

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

• When you add a link to your post and add the caption, it goes to the first line and not where I had the cursor. I do not want the link to be the first thing people read.
• The Tailwind Create is fun and helpful but still hard to use.

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.

Tailwind is great when it focuses on it's core functionality. However, in my opinion, Tailwind isn't great at listening to their customers and instead likes to add features that are not beneficial and tend to "break" the other features that ultimately sell it's product. In my opinion, it has lost ROI over time and was much better 3-4 years ago.

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

I have received wonderful support from Tailwind. Recently when I was on their new Tailwind Create and was looking at their site photos, I had a question and I received an answer in less than 24 hours. They have also been receptive to comments and ideas to make the product better and they used some of the ideas as well giving us a discount for the help.

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

When I was looking for a solution for Instagram, neither Buffer nor Hootsuite were offering the ability to post directly to Instagram. That may have changed recently, but in my opinion, Tailwind is a much more user-friendly, less (unnecessarily) complex solution for Instagram management. I don't need a ton of in-depth analytics; I just need to be able to be efficient, consistent and engaging in my posts. Tailwind allows me to do that without getting bogged down in all the bells and whistles on Hootsuite or Buffer.

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

• Definitely an ROI - We have increased our clicks on our website due to traffic from Pinterest, primarily from our Smart Loop.
• We have increased Pinterest following due to our intensive use of Smart Loop, which has led to #1 (increased website traffic).
• Organization and time management has been a massive advantage of utilizing Tailwind. Because I can set Smart Loop and not worry about it, I can dedicate my time to other areas of the business.

Incentivized