Mention vs. Sysomos, now part of Meltwater

Mention is perfect if you are looking for a fairly inexpensive software that will help you monitor your brand reputation, help you discover SEO opportunities, and potentially help you generate sales revenue. While I know Mention can work with bigger companies, I personally feel this fits the SMB market the best. On the other hand, Mention may not be for you if you have a mega brand and need to see sentiment analysis.

Incentivized

Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload

Incentivized

• Engagement - Knowing how well your content is doing with your audiences is a beneficial feature to have at your disposal.
• Reach - Knowing the who, and where your content ends up, gives a better insight into how compelling your content is.
• Data Reports - The many features offered by Mention is invaluable. Some of the best thought out features are with this company.

Incentivized

• Sysomos Heartbeat: the proactive social media monitoring software. The dashboard was efficient and minimalist, and provided detailed reporting on where the social conversation was held for each individual hotel. The rich data and the simplicity of the dashboard made this tool particularly useful and easy to implement -- it was also easier to train new employees with the software.
• Sysomos Heartbeat: We also used it to keep track of any crisis that arose. The tool made it easy to catch any spikes in conversation that would spread rapidly either across one channel or multiple channels.
• Customer Service: Our hotels receive lots of inquiries, requests, payments, and reviews through various social channels. Sysomos helped keep track of them.

Incentivized

• Mention is an older platform and in this rapidly changing world and "need it now," I'm not feeling it's really there yet.
• I'm having to create my own social tracking using IFTTT and Zapier to be ahead of the curve. I wish Mention was as fast.

Incentivized

• Their influencer/klout score algorithm is worthless - it caps out at 10 so the New York Times and Jo Schmo gamer dude and Justin Bieber all have the same score.
• The Boolean builder can be frustrating, it will tell you there is an error, but gives you no indication of where. In a complex string it can take forever to figure out what you messed up.
• Twitter listening only goes back one year. If you ever need to compare something year over year, without anticipating the need in advance and downloading reports, you're screwed.

Incentivized

There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.

The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction

The system is typically pretty fast and easily accesible. Due to contract restrictions, our team sometimes has issues with overlap in usage (we only have one login to share amongst the team).

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

If searching over longer time frame, it can take a while to return results. SOmetimes as long as two to three minutes.

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

Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."

Incentivized

We had a kick-off training with the whole team where they walked us through the functionality. This was a pretty effective and comprehensive training.

Implementation was so easy I dont even remember it!

Incentivized

Brand24 was my alternative to Mention, I switched back in 2018 because Mention's pricing was going up. While Brand24 is a U.K. based company, I still thought it may be beneficial to me here in the U.S. However, I didn't think about time zone differences and when the support would be available to me. Normally when you have a question, you want it answered right now, but that was a bit of a problem for them. Mention is very quick with support and understanding of their own program.

Incentivized

Sysomos MAP is focused on listening (not management of social media accounts - features exist, but these are not the core purpose). It does a great job of measuring open networks, particularly Twitter, and a good job of monitoring mainstream press sites. For the most part it scales well, and the user-interface is relatively user-friendly, which allows us to decentralize use (important for a very large organization). Not the most expensive of the pack either.

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

• Lowered costs and overhead when Expion got introduced as we now use one centralized solution for all of our social media work
• We can finally calculate ROI with ease and understand our campaign performance through proper tracking and analytics
• Competition tracking was never easier

Incentivized