Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring) vs. Simply Measured (discontinued)

If you're tasked with publishing content to social on behalf of your organization then this tool is certainly worth considering. You have quick and easy capability to schedule across multiple platforms with drag-and-drop simplicity. It ties into Salesforce's real strength of its CRM platform so you can quickly tie social activity and leads to those already in your database. And it does a good job at monitoring and analyzing brand and competitor content across multiple media types. Having said that, if you're into deep-dive and full functionality SaaS tools then this might not be for you as it covers three areas adequately, but not in enough detail or strength to make it a star performer

Incentivized

When we we're determining what's important to us we think budget, are we stuck in a contract; can it grow with our needs without hurting our pockets; can it solve our needs because we're such a large company that we almost need several solutions in one. Reporting - am I able to provide management the details they need to know to prove ROI? Also can we prove that demand generation efforts lead to closed deals?

Incentivized

• The amount of the information that radian6 can pull from multiple social platforms is absolutely phenomenal. Its just not only the pull but the way the information can be presented in dashboards was way good. It helped us understand in various aspects of our social presence.
• Multiple profiles helped us to break down the Big/Huge social buzz cloud to smaller and more manageable pieces. This helped us concentrate on the lows and helped us to plan better on turning them to highs.
• Radian6 allowed us to follow thru the crowd trends with the latest information presented in a single view. This also helped us to collect the social opinion on the product releases.
• The ease of use, one need not be an expert to start using this platform. The interface is easily understandable by anyone.
• A keyword can be edited quickly to tailor the needs and the results were quick.

Incentivized

• Customer service analysis has been extremely useful for determining sentiment and adding context to real time crisis situations.
• Convenience of pulling data for all social channels at one time is extremely effective in making decisions in real time and to compare against other channel performance. The cross channel export minimizes a great deal of time for exporting data. Nearly all social channel data is available.
• Reports are extremely user friendly, visual and easy to export. Also the ability to see the raw data and to have it for historical reference is great.
• Key insights generated in the dashboard page help add fast context for performance.

Incentivized

• Instagram Social Listening - it currently does not offer much social listening in terms of Instagram.
• Instagram Owned - It currently stops pulling once an update is "old" by their standards, even if it receives recent comments. They can force pull, but you have to work with their tech team to do so.

Incentivized

• While it incorporates MOST platforms not all of them, I believe Pinterest was still in trial. They will need to keep up to date as new platforms emerge.
• Not a super user friendly interface. I found it to be a bit clunky and dated looking.
• While their training was good, and they had good support resources, I think they good do more with marketing and education to help my team uncover more value from the software.

Incentivized

I spent a lot of time researching the right platform for me and our organisation (thanks to the other reviews on TrustRadius also). Having used other platforms when I found frustrations getting my everyday work done, I knew exactly what I wanted and this is why I chose Social Studio. While there have been a few hiccups, the quarterly update releases and the outstanding tech support have kept me more than happy.

For my current client, it's not right - they would not be actionable with the data to really need this tool. For my past clients, I would suggest they stay on it and i think they would agree.

Incentivized

• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.

The interface is very simple and organized around the core elements of the platform : the reports.

The platform is rarely down

No issues with performance.

As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.

Extremely fast response and they go above and beyond without asking. The support team has provided me data beyond our limit before and it was not an issue and not an extra cost, really good business support.

Incentivized

• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.

Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.

Very good implementation.

Compared to Radian6, I found Meltwater Buzz, Simply Measured, and Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Meltwater Buzz and Radian6 are very similar products with many of the same functionalities but Buzz presents your analytics in a way that is much easier to understand. I did a two week trial with Sprout Social and absolutely loved the product but our company needed the capability to connect to Salesforce, which is available on R6 and Buzz. Simply Measured is my all time favorite but I have only used the free version so I am not completely sure how it stacks up to Radian6

Simply Measured has more in-depth reports than other tools in this category. Other tools may feature a lower price and are easier to learn. Others focus on only one channel, let's say Twitter. Simply Measured is comprehensive, extensive and has the depth to match. It's one of the few tools that can measure the impact of an individual message as opposed to the account in aggregate.

Incentivized

• Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
• Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
• If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.

Incentivized

• Increased efficiency of reporting. Although I still keep my own spreadsheets and create a few charts and graphs, Simply Measured's reports have saved me countless hours.
• Greater Visibility: Simply Measured's reports have helped increase the visibility of what the social media team is doing. What executive doesn't like a smart report?