Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued) vs. Vista Social

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 I need to schedule a full week of posts for multiple clients. the calendar view makes it fast and clear. When a client sends last-minute edits, I can quickly reschedule or update posts by dragging them in the calendar. When I’m short on time I use the AI tools to generate quick captions and adjust them to fit the brand voice. When I manage comments and DMs I reply to everything from one inbox, without switching platforms. When planning content, I use Canva inside Vista Social and publish directly, which saves a lot of time.

• 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

• The design and layout of the site is simple, with the options to click through the different tools on the left hand side of the page. What I liked most about Vista Social is the ability to combine all the different tools that a social media manager needs into one platform.
• I typically use various different apps and platforms to write down notes, assign tasks to different team members, and look at my overall content calendar for the month. It is brilliant that Vista Social is able to combine all of these into one platform.
• When first signing up to Vista Social and exploring the platform, each page offers you a walkthrough of all of the tools available to you, which is really handy, as well as a customer support section on the right bottom hand corner.

• 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

• I think the price is quite high compared to hiring a person for the same task. This may put one off from purchasing as with a bit more time you can do the same job yourself or with an employee for much less
• In my opinion, the interface is rather complicated visually and doesn't have an appeal. It is cramped with so many features that provide a sense of confusion whilst starting off
• In my experience, the tutorials do leave a few questions afterwards regarding set up and this can take more time to figure out by yourself.

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.

Very effective, efficient and an integral part of our daily work. Our team members are more productive and motivated to finish projects.

• 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.

Since the platform is user-friendly and easy to navigate, start using it and making content creation feel effortless. The dashboard and each module for content management and creation it has the visual hierarchies in place. Building, customizing and exporting reports to PDF facilitate the journey with the clients. Its overall usability is well rounded for such large and powerful tool.

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.

• 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.

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

It's reasonably priced compared to others and offers more capabilities for creating and implementing marketing campaigns. For example, social listening, reputation management, and employee advocacy are all tools it has that I haven't found in the previous ones. It also supports all marketing campaigns, not just social media.

• 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

• The DM automation feature means we're not missing out on important messages when we're off the clock (after hours essentially), which is a huge advantage in hospitality where response time is everything.
• In most cases, time is money, and being able to manage all our platforms from one place has cut down hours of switching between apps and tabs. That in itself has boosted our company's productivity and allowed the team to respond faster to guests and potential leads.
• The real-time insights and mentions helps us tweak content and react to trends quicker, which has increased our visibility and bookings.