Talkwalker is a social media search, monitoring and analytics tool. It delivers insights on any given search term and metrics on owned and earned media performance. Talkwalker offers flexible dashboards, APIs and reports featuring comprehensive filters and actionable social media insights that create strong added value for brands and agencies worldwide.
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Visible Intelligence, discontinued
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Visible Intelligence, developed by Visible Technologies and formerly offered under the name Cymfony, was a listening tool with an analytics dashboard. Visible was acquired by Cision, and later discontinued.
Talkwalker is well suited for big companies and agencies that are looking for a long-term solution to keep track of the industry and/or their brands and key competitors. While setup requires a bit of dedication (especially in terms of custom filters and tags), once it's done, the tool will give the user a lot of flexibility to analyze the conversations and find the relevant results that answer the business questions. Companies just looking for a tool to track a short time period, or simple things like Twitter hashtags, won't take advantage of the full capabilities of this tool. Therefore, they could feel frustrated when comparing the outcomes/usage versus the costs.
The only time I have trouble recommending Visible is to my clients of specific markets. We work with several McDonald's co-ops and we can't narrow our searches to a specific region for example, to the state of Iowa or Kansas City region.
Truly global listening platform - monitor a deep range of media types from all over the world. Particularly strong in supporting competitive monitoring and analysis briefs across regions and countries. It monitors content in original language which I believe is a very strong monitoring factor.
Easy to use yet powerful dashboard visualisations - the dashboard interface is among the best I have seen. While it can accomplish many things, and under the hood is a very powerful and complex tool, the user interface is very intuitive, slick, quick and packed with all the KPIs you could want.
Customisation of the tool is a great feature. You can build your own dashboard and reporting spaces to suit your needs. You can schedule alerts from the system in a variety of outputs to keep you up to date with the latest events.
Customer support & technological advancement - the team at Talkwalker are highly proficient, always willing to support our every need, however big or small. Talkwalker aim to release around 4 software updates each year which means the platform is always full of the latest data visualisations and monitoring technologies
Having 'traditional' media monitored alongside social as well as owned media assets in one dashboard space is invaluable to help brands understand where their media footprint lies and how they perform in each media set, relative to the others.
AI - Talkwalker has introduced greater AI capabilities recently which means the capability of the tool in monitoring is ever-increasing, and the accuracy of targeting content and sentiment analysis is improving. The Visual Insights and image recognition technology is a really strong feature, and a very welcome addition to the monitoring aspect
The way the cloud of related terms, a.k.a "social media differentiating terms", was organized into a chart with the frequency of appearance was extremely helpful. Each term was also a link to other terms that may be related to your research as well, which was insightful.
Visible Intelligence allows you to view the differentiating terms across platforms. This is particularly a useful tool when trying to compare and understand what is being said and where exactly (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Most of the social media analytical tools allow you to view "sample content". However, and I find this extremely useful in many cases, Visible Intelligence allows you to directly connect with the person that posted the content. Because of such feature more clarification can be accomplished.
The system is complicated. With everything that you're able to do, it does come at the cost of simplicity. It definitely requires training and a high level of expertise to properly leverage what it can do.
The system can be slow. If you "ask" it to do too many things at once, it can get hung up and do the spin of doom.
Firehose terms. I wish there was a place in setting or somewhere that let us know what firehose terms we currently have. To make it really great it would be nice for it to also show a history of what terms we had in the past with dates and the start dates of current firehose terms. I can't tell you how many times we've had to reach out to our rep to let us know what we currently have in place and when you have multiple users in the agency using the tool, it's near impossible to keep track of when changes were made.
Exports, I wish there was a way to have larger exports. And if you can't, an easier way to break down larger exports. For example, say my timeframe is only 1 day and I have over 20,000 results in that day– there is no way for me to export all of those results by breaking it down because my only options are most recent, most relevant, klout, most confident, most influential, most followers, positive, negative. There's no option to break down 1 day by the first 20,000 then the second 20,000 and so on. Instead I have to then manually break it down by media type and hope each one of those is less than 20,000.
Author influence, I know this algorithm is tricky but at the very least I think it could be better explained within the tool so when clients ask questions we can answer them. It could be nice to have some filtering options with this because several authors get a 99 score and it's not valuable information.
Tagging, when tagging content it is extremely annoying that I can't add new tags in the "select tags" drop down. It takes too much time to go in to where I can add new tags and then go back to where I was.
It'd also be nice to have setting for a stream where only a certain folder or folders of tags display. So when I'm in client x's search the only tags that display are client x's instead of all 5 clients and I have to keep scrolling through to find what I need.
Archive, when you hit archive on a post it does nothing. It stays in your search and ends up in all you charts which skews your data. What I do now is I created an actual tag called "archive" (because if I didn't tag it with that and I exported everything nothing in the excel doc tells me I hit Visible's archive button for that result) I export the search, I remove everything I tagged as "archive" in excel and then I manual make charts. When I hit Visible's "archive" button it should be completely removed and if I made a mistake and I want to un-archive it, there should be a section where I can go and see everything I archived and be able to un-archive it.
I loved the way Visible Intelligence was similar yet different from Radian6. Although I have more experience with Radian6, it still wasn't hard to use and get familiar with Visible Intelligence. I personally liked how easy it was to do your "thing" and conduct your analysis using VI. That is plenty of reason for me to consider re-using it in any project that requires social media analysis.
Talkwalker gets the job done at a basic level. It performs regular indexing of existing webpages and tracks the instances in which a particular brand or company is mentioned. Especially for being free, this is an awesome resource. However, it should be said that this product does not perform nearly at the level of the paid options.
They are very helpful, but can sometimes be a little too quick and not explain things in as great a depth as we would like. They have great staff and programs, and we don't really have any other major complaints. Support is very responsive and helpful when need be.
I have yet to find another tool that would provide me with such a detailed information per query. It's such a find! Plus, I get separate emails per a search query and I'm able to archive those emails to the appropriate folders and always have a way of looking back. It's very useful for building monthly reports.
The free tool is a no-brainer. It absolutely helps ferret out mentions on social media that I wasn't aware of before.
Now, I can use the tool for clients, too, so for consultants, it can be a great way to help stay on top of what's being said about them online, as well.
Using the paid version would help delve into even more insights for your business.
