Meltwater vs. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

If you practice media relations in your role, Meltwater is helpful. You can do research to find relevant publications and journalists, build media lists, export them to share with a team or client and you can also keep notes on your campaigns. I like using it for research, although I do research outside the platform, as well, to be sure to be thorough (and some of the info in the database is outdated). I would say if you don't practice media relations, it's probably not as useful. There are other tools that do a better job if you want to search for media or social media mentions, for example. If you are looking for an all-in-one media relations tool that's relatively easy to use, Meltwater is probably a good fit.

Incentivized

Talkwalker is well suited for big companies and agencies that are looking for a long-term solution to keep track of the industry and/or their brands and key competitors. While setup requires a bit of dedication (especially in terms of custom filters and tags), once it's done, the tool will give the user a lot of flexibility to analyze the conversations and find the relevant results that answer the business questions. Companies just looking for a tool to track a short time period, or simple things like Twitter hashtags, won't take advantage of the full capabilities of this tool. Therefore, they could feel frustrated when comparing the outcomes/usage versus the costs.

Incentivized

• Up to date contact information. It is actually relevant and active info, not always the case with others.
• The user interface is better than most tools. While not perfect, it's pretty easy to figure out how to get what you want.
• Their support is excellent. Anytime I've needed help I can call, but better than this, they proactively call and assist.

Incentivized

• Talkwalker helps you monitor online mentions so you can stay aware of what's being said about your company. Social listening is more important than ever.
• Talkwalker also helps you delve deeper into the social insights to track patterns and give you data that can be helpful in the future as you plan your marketing efforts.
• Talkwalker is one of the only products like it that incorporates AI and is, according to some, on the cutting edge in its field.

Incentivized

• Their tracking system for media mentions isn't perfect - we have stumbled across several posts mentioning our company/product that were not picked up by the platform. While frustrating, we send these URLs to our rep and their tech team ensures that that website will be monitored moving forward.

Incentivized

• A recent update has made adding filters to the dashboard far more convoluted than necessary.
• Many metrics are displayed as "3.4M", it would be great if you could hover over that number to see the full "3,371,000".
• The tagging feature is buggy and often needs to be done twice to tag the mentions applied in the rule.

Incentivized

We have had great success with Meltwater Buzz the past 2 years. The reporting has been great for our board reports, seeing the conversations going on between our followers helps us to learn who our audience is and what we can do better on our social media. The analytics we see on Meltwater Buzz we could not get anywhere else

Incentivized

Love it! In most cases, Talkwalker is a no-brainer: I can confidently recommend it to clients.

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.

Despite all the functionalities available on the platform, I never felt overwhelmed or confused

Talkwalker gets the job done at a basic level. It performs regular indexing of existing webpages and tracks the instances in which a particular brand or company is mentioned. Especially for being free, this is an awesome resource. However, it should be said that this product does not perform nearly at the level of the paid options.

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

They are very helpful, but can sometimes be a little too quick and not explain things in as great a depth as we would like. They have great staff and programs, and we don't really have any other major complaints. Support is very responsive and helpful when need be.

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.

Meltwater serves as an all-in-one platform, so it has benefitted us greatly in being able to service a variety of needs in one place. Having a streamlined platform is important to our team since it can feel counterproductive to visit a variety of products to service one client's needs. So, Meltwater has been essential in ensuring our needs are met through one destination.

Incentivized

I have yet to find another tool that would provide me with such a detailed information per query. It's such a find! Plus, I get separate emails per a search query and I'm able to archive those emails to the appropriate folders and always have a way of looking back. It's very useful for building monthly reports.

Incentivized

• Improved PR reporting, for sure.
• Competitor analysis for clients and ourselves.
• A great ability to track the news and understand particular news drivers for certain industries, allowing us to get our client in front of the media at or before the perfect moment.

Incentivized

• Having learned how to better leverage the system has resulted in a greater diversity in projects and clients that we didn't have the capabilities to service before, which has in turn increased our visibility to the wider company.
• It has reduced the amount of time it takes to do reporting from traditional desk research and utilizing other monitoring tools.

Incentivized