MobileMonkey, headquartered in Boston, offers their social media messaging marketing tool to marketers and agencies, featuring chatbots, landing page creation, integration with social ads, and an emphasis on Facebook. They offer a free plan and a paid plan with more advanced features (e.g. bot analytics, drip campaigns, etc.). MobileMonkey acquired ChattyPeople to extend their chatbot building capabilities.
$21.75
per month
Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Sysomos was a social media listening and marketing solution for content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics. Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater, and is no longer available, but the features of the former Sysomos are now part of the Meltwater platform.
MobileMonkey would be great if you have a really strong social media presence and want to capitalize on people visiting your pages. It's great if you have a tech friendly audience who is not afraid to talk to a chatbot. If you have an audience where they might be uncomfortable or more of an "uptight" audience then it might not be fore you. It's also not great for heavy B2B if your focus is on high level targets as they're likely not logged in to Facebook at work. B2C is probably the best function for MobileMonkey, although it could be used to help field support messages.
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
Ad-hoc research. During planning phase of a campaign it is a helpful tool to understand the marketplace, key influencers and topics that engage a target demographic.
Post-event hashtag analysis. Rapid generation of reporting on efficacy of a campaign, key voices, topics that resonated, viral reach and more.
User interface. Friendly and accessible enough to minimize training needs and enable decentralized access, though we have found some hand-holding is still required to get the most out of the platform.
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
MobileMonkey support is second to none when you have a paid plan. Always willing to help and make your life a lot easier when you're facing any technical difficulties or frustrations. When I was on the free plan, I found plenty of useful resources that helped me solve my problems, and I could still contact support for help.
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."
MobileMonkey is a lot less expensive than both Olark and Drift. We chose MobileMonkey because we were hoping the familiar interface and integration between social and the website would drive more interest which would lead to conversion and revenue. It's more of a chatbot than Intercom in that Intercom is really good for customer support, but MM is a nice way to get people interested by sharing high level data through a conversation that doesn't require a real person. However, Olark, Drift, and Intercom all integrate with the major CRMs and marketing automation platforms which gives them a real edge over MobileMonkey at this time.
We've used Sprout Social & Hootsuite in the past -- and they all stack up pretty evenly. Sysomos has the same features as Sprout or Hootsuite, except their reports and analytics are a little more detailed. Hootsuite has a better social media management software and dashboard though
