Rival IQ in Seattle delivers social media analytics and competitive insights to help digital marketers make informed decisions, improve results, and better understand competitors. Using benchmarks and comparative analysis, Rival IQ's technology is designed to enable digital marketers to uncover new opportunities, identify trends, and track results across all the main social channels and the web.
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Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 9.5 out of 10
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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.
I think it's a great tool to be used by any brand. The interface is user friendly, creating a safe space for account managers and social media managers alike. The only instance in where it wouldn't be optimal is if you're looking at very historical data, or tracking additional influencers (not competitors) or if you have multiple profiles (within 1 channel) to track.. But this suits our needs very well.
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.
Managing companies within your installation aren't always easy. You can map companies to landscapes, but if you run out of slots for companies (based on your subscription tier) you end up having to swap companies frequently to get the reporting you need.
RivalIQ is competitively priced on a tiered structure, but if you want to add small sets of additional data within tiers, such as additional companies, the pricing is prohibitive as to force you into the next tier up.
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
Support is continuous and very helpful. Email, phone, and chat support are always on and someone is always there to help. Your CSR will contact you quarterly to take your temperature and offer assistance or training, if necessary. Feature requests are taken seriously. They share their product development roadmap, which is a major plus.
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."
I demoed this platform as an alternative to Rival IQ and it has some of the similar features but the cost is much higher so it wasn't in our budget. If I had the choice, I might choose Falcon over Rival IQ because the visuals are much better than they are in Rival IQ.
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
