Cost effective, reliable and all inclusive
Social Studio was used by ScS for Social Listening, scheduling and content creation. The platform did everything it advertised, and I had …
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Formerly Radian6 + Buddy Media
Starting at $1,000 Per Org Per Month
View PricingOverview
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)?
Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2011 and - along with Buddy Media - became Salesforce Social Studio. The product is slated to be retired in November 2024.
Recent Reviews
Popular Features
- Content planning and scheduling (10)10.0100%
- Broad channel coverage (10)10.0100%
- Twitter (10)9.090%
- Workflow management (10)8.080%
Pricing
Basic
$1,000.00
Cloud
Per Org Per Month
Pro
$4,000.00
Cloud
Per Org Per Month
Corporate
$12,000.00
Cloud
Per Org Per Month
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Features
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Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)?
Social Studio (formerly Radian6 and Buddy Media) enables users to listen, engage, and publish within a social media marketing and management suite — and connect enriched social data to marketing with sales and service. Social Studio was the result of Salesforce' combining of Radian6 with the capabilities of Buddy Media, a social media publishing tool acquired by Salesforce in 2012. Social Studio is slated to be retired in November of 2024.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring) Competitors
- Bottlenose
- Brandwatch
- Verint Messaging
- Digimind Social
- TotalSocial by Engagement Labs
- Engagor (discontinued)
- General Sentiment (discontinued)
- Hootsuite
- ListenLogic
- MutualMind
- Quid
- Social Suite by Reputation.com
- Oracle Social Cloud (legacy)
- PeopleBrowsr
- Social Data Intelligence SM2
- Simplify360
- Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
- Sparkcentral (discontinued)
- Sprinklr Social
- Synthesio Social Intelligence Suite
- uberVu (discontinued)
- Viralheat (Discontinued)
- Visible Intelligence, discontinued
- muFusion
- Brand24
- Talkwalker
- Ubermetrics
- Tracx
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2011 and - along with Buddy Media - became Salesforce Social Studio. The product is slated to be retired in November 2024.
Bottlenose, Brandwatch, and Verint Messaging are common alternatives for Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring).
Reviewers rate Sentiment analysis and Broad channel coverage and Content planning and scheduling highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(149)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 51)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
June 11, 2019
Cost effective, reliable and all inclusive
- Social listening / competitor monitoring
- Scheduling
- Instagram integration
- Reliability
- Usability - clunky to use
April 17, 2018
Radian6 - Monitoring of Social Media
- 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.
- The initial setup was difficult to make it live. Despite the fact that the radian6 is a great tool, there is still a lot to improve upon with regard to the setup process.
- Narrowing down the search sometimes produces glitches. I have experienced some glitches when looking up for the period time like 90 days with fewer keywords.
- There is room to improve the export data functionality.
April 13, 2018
Jack of all trades, master of none
- One stop shop: if you are looking for a tool that combines multiple facets found in individual tools then this could be for you
- Scheduling posts is a breeze across platform. So this is clearly geared towards marketers or community managers who need a quick and simple way to manage communications output
- Salesforce is a ubiquitous platform these days - social studio is a natural extension of this (the engage and CRM functionality plays to this strength) so for businesses of any size that subscribe to the Salesforce suite, adding this tool would make total sense
- The user interface is rather simplistic which can be seen as a pro - intuitive and easy to navigate, and more quickly accessible for newbies over rival platforms which can have steep learning curves and layers of detailed functionality which take time to get familiar with
- Jack of all trades, master of none: OK so this might sound a bit harsh, but while the tool accomplished three similar functions competently, and all under one bonnet, the fact that none of them are outstanding in functionality and capability in my book that also counts as a weakness, regardless of the fact they are all combined in one software suite. It would seem that Salesforce needs to think more carefully about who the target user audience is here - publishers, sellers and marketers, or insight types who work with the content - it's a bit lacklustre in all three areas
- Simplicity vs total control: I mentioned previously that it has a very intuitive, accessible and 'simplistic' (in a good way) UI which makes getting to grips with the tool great for early adopters. BUT with this comes the downfall that it is rather simplistic, and the rich functionality that is available in other platforms is just not seen here. For example, the engagement scores for competitor brands (not client / owned brands) are not available, meaning you can't do deeper dive analysis on content performance for rival organizations. The ability to only export content in 90 day chunks is also frustrating
- For such a large organisation, think about how much support you're going to need from Salesforce. You might have to be prepared to wing it on your own
March 16, 2018
Social Studio, great for scheduling and analysis
- Scheduling posts
- Tracking social media metrics
- Analysis
- Doesn't allow you to tag other users/accounts in scheduled posts.
- Easy end-user graphical interface, create powerful dashboards in minutes.
- Can be integrated with other tools like Salesforce.
- Fast, refreshes and retrieves your queries in seconds; you can have several dashboards with your key metrics, keywords, tag cloud, etc.
- Some networks are out of the tool: i.e. only Facebook open public API but not all of it, other social networks are missing as well.
- Having 2 separate consoles: Engagement console and the Radian6 dashboard console (one is web-based and the other is via desktop app).
- The engagement console is very powerful but difficult to set up.
December 18, 2017
A great tool for big organizations
- Easy to use
- Post Calendar
- Collaboration Module
- Nice Workflow
- Learning curve
- Maybe too much information to be analyzed together
- Some features, that initially were available, are missing with last releases
December 05, 2017
Marketing in retail real estate
- Quality Assurance
- Easy to Use
- Sharing Ability
- Only seeing posts for one property after post is scheduled would be ideal
- Live Chat would be ideal
August 01, 2017
Social Studio - Good Basic Tool, but Expensive
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Social listening - pulling in mass amounts of data.
- Publishing - creating a content calendar and publishing to multiple platforms.
- User interface - it has a fairly intuitive UI.
- Analytics - the analytics are very surface level and leave something to be desired. It lags behind other tools like Sprinklr or crimson hexagon.
- Topic profiles - the idea of "topic profiles" to power searches can be confusing and is inefficient.
- Reporting - The auto-generated reports weren't very good. I generally exported raw data to Excel and created my own reports after scrubbing the data.
- Social Listening - boolean search queries that can be narrowed down by source and language, as well as location, to ensure it's relevant to the brand.
- Owned Channel Monitoring - pulling owned content/comments into streams for moderation, engagement and review.
- Publishing - scheduling, drafting, tracking brand owned social posts.
- 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.
April 05, 2017
Social Studio is competent
- It helps you visualize your social calendar on a daily, weekly, and monthly level. I liked seeing the days posts not just listed out, but listed in hourly blocks. It helped me make sure everything was spaced out nicely.
- It lets you preview the way your content will look on each social platform.
- Duplicating content was fairly easy.
- I would have loved a library function for all the images I continually post on social.
- I wish I could have dragged content on the calendar. For instance, if I had a post scheduled at 3:00 but I needed to move it to 5:00, I wish I could have just dragged the post on the calendar to the 5:00 slot, rather than opening the post and editing the scheduled time.
- When too many posts were on the calendar, it looked very cluttered.
April 22, 2016
Radian6: measurements and insights
- I liked that Radian6 measured multiple social media platforms.
- I liked the easy-to-use interface of Radian6.
- I liked the fact that Radian6 allowed for the export of information, charts and results to easily compile into a document that could be shared with upper leadership.
- I frequently wished I could see a share of voice a little easier - how a company compares with competitors.
- I had trouble setting up keywords to monitor certain companies or industry trends.
- When I used Radian6, I wanted to be able to monitor in real time more effectively.
January 06, 2016
Radian6 - The Gold Standard for The Enterprise
- It is hands-down, the best tool for monitoring brand mentions at an enterprise level.
- It provides profiles for multiple users.
- It allows you to identify and address conversations rapidly.
- It is difficult to use if your brand has a very common name. For example, if your company name is "Ignite" there could be many different reasons why someone would use that word and the results can be useless. If you have a very unique name like "Starbucks" most of the results will be relevant.
- It isn't a cost effective tool for smaller brands. There are cheaper, more basic tools for those businesses.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Superior publishing platform with the ability to share workspaces and content calendars between users
- Seamless integration with external tools like Google Analytics and bit.ly allow for content creation in one place
- Engagement of all channels in one place with he ability to assign enquiries to other team members and follow up on progress
- Superior data collection from major social channels, as well as blogs, forums and mainstream news sites
- Performance alanysis for own channels and the ability to create dashboards for reporting
- Some channels not supported yet (Instagram for example) and content from Facebook events is not captured
- Customisable, and exportable reports still not available in the analyze component of Social Studio - some reporting still needs to be done in Radian6
- Can't tag people in responses, or tag people/pages in posts for Facebook yet (this means we still schedule some content direct to FB if this is needed)
March 18, 2015
Review of Radian6
- Radian6 is definitely proficient in twitter search
- General keyword search
- The only real issue with Radian6 is the pricing for the product. It's a little high.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Single interface to our three main platforms; LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook.
- Aggregated calendar showing when posts and tweets are scheduled.
- Dashboard access to performance reporting.
- Shared workspace allows coordination with Agencies and others that are working remote.
- Images do not always show up in posts, API issues.
- Cannot toggle between calendar and posts easily.
- More in-tool resources for researching topics and #s to use in posts.
November 04, 2014
Radian6 Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The ability to dive into data various ways and bring user directly to source of mention. I love the ability to look at data and dig into the data. For example, looking at Topic Trends and then being able to dive into the River of News from a specific point in the Topic Trends. Another way would be to look at the keyword groups, dive into media type and then dive into a specific media type for more detailed data about Twitter or Forums specifically.
- I really like the art of the Keyword Configuration and ability to filter noise.
- Number of sources covered. One of the things I love about the tool is the ability to crawl so many sources including social media sites, blogs, mainstream news, forums, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and more. The tool covers over 650 million sources of data the last rep I talked to in late July, 2013.
- Ability to train multiple users across the organization.
- I really like the Engagement Console workflow and use the feature to delegate mentions to the appropriate stakeholders. I also like to flag and prioritize mentions among team members. We can also respond to mentions from the tool specifically if we need to.
- Provide insights based on data.
- Customize Reports. Many times, I would like to see data a specific way. Currently, this tool does not allow me to custom build a report in the tool to send to my managers. I will need to export data and create my own dashboard based on the data I would like to see. The Summary Dashboard does not provide me the reporting I need.
- Sentiment could be improved.
October 30, 2014
Radian6 - Strengths and Weaknesses but Still at the Top
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Social media monitoring: Radian6 excels in pulling in mentions of our brand as well as a detailed assortment of key words. Topic Profiles allow an incredible amount of filtering and let create separate stacks or queues for different topics. It also allows "Does Not include" key words in the Topic Profiles. Different profiles can be designed for different teams, also.
- Categorization of posts: Radian6 offers more categorization of posts than any tool I've used. This includes post tags, source tags, sentiment, priority, engagement level, classification level, and assign to user. Users can create their own system for how they want to use these, but it's not required.
- Macros: One of my team's favorite things about Radian6 is that we can create macros. These are shortcut buttons within the engagement console that we can program to do multiple actions. For example, a macro for "Alumni Association" may mark a post positive, add a post tag of Alumni, add a high priority flag, and assign the post to a specific user. Multiple workflow actions taken care of with one click.
- Analytics: This is still emerging but Radian6 does a pretty good job once you know what you're doing. only down side is that you have to open and log into a separate window to access it, which happens to be the Radian6 Dashboard. This is the same place you create and design your Topic Profiles and keyword groups, etc. The Analysis Widgets, Rivers of News, etc. provide a lot of flexibility for viewing things like mentions per time period, pie charts by post tag, and word clouds. It's also easy to export all posts from a chart.
- Assigning and managing posts: User assignment is easy and flexible within Radian6. Users can quickly create their own My Tasks stack, as well as other stacks to monitor effectively.
- Setup: Radian6 is incredibly difficult to get up and running. I'm the only one on my team that took the time to learn it. Two years later, there are still things I have to have our account rep walk me through. Once set up correctly though, it functions great.
- Fragmentation: Because of all the companies and tools they've acquired and incorporated, the Salesforce ecosystem is quite fragmented. Use the Engagement Console for monitoring and engaging, use the dashboard website for setup, filtering, and analytics, use the Social Hub site for more details filtering and automated rules, use the Summary Dashboard site for other broad view analytics. I just want it all to be in one system. Fortunately, this is exactly what they're working on.
- Managed Accounts: I still don't entirely understand what these are and why they need to be set up this way. The execution could definitely be better.
September 12, 2014
Radian6 Experience over the past 3 years
- Friendly user interface. Easy to navigate and easy to set up the account based on keyword
- Stability - almost never had problem with logging in or getting kicked out of the program unexpectedly during the 3 years of use.
- Certain features. I really like the keyword cloud as well as the topic trend.
- Export limit. 500 mentions is too little. Any topic could easily gather over 2000 mentions in my experience.
- Keyword sentiment. This is the major turn-off but it is not unique only to Radian 6.The keyword-based analysis cannot properly interpret human emotions. The sentiment we received is not accurate but we just don't have the time to go through these mentions manually to get a favorability ratio.
- Level of noise. Often times there are quite a few automated and duplicated message/advertising that should have been noticed, captured and filtered out automatically by the system.
May 14, 2014
Why Radian6 Might Not Be For You
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Radian6 integrates with other enterprise applications like Salesforce.com and analytics like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics.
- Radian6 does not pull data from a handful of major sites that provide extremely useful content, such as LinkedIn groups, Amazon reviews, and Google+.
- Radian6 also does not capture comments made in response to Facebook fan page post or pick up posts proactively made by fans to pages unless the fans make all their content public.
- The query search for Radian6 basically consists of "and" "or" and "not" as filtering tools but doesn't provide other valuable filtering options such as narrowing your search to specific sites or links.
- Radian6's website is entirely in Flash, which makes your computer slow down quite a bit.
- The collaboration process has some glitches. For example, when a user creates a campaign or keyword to track, everyone on the team can see it but will not have the ability to modify anything.
- In addition to the license fee, there is a per-topic profile fee, which is where you tell it what data you want to pull in. If you want to separate data, there is only so much you can do within one topic profile. If you go over your data limit, you'll be charged!
- It's very expensive. If you're a small - mid-sized company you can probably get the same results with a much more affordable software.
May 06, 2014
Radian6 review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- I think Radian6 have one of the best data crawls out of the Social Monitoring tools that I have used. The tool consistently returns the largest volume numbers.
- Radian6 is great at getting a read on what is being said about your brand and most importantly, doing so quickly. It only takes a minute or two to set up a keyword group and the pull can run in a matter of seconds.
- The tool's AI behind the data crawl is smart. When searching for certain keywords like Pepsi, social mentions that include Pepsi in a hashtag are also pulled back. So not only posts including #Pepsi, but also #ILovePepsi would be pulled back as well.
- The export or raw data can be tedious. Currently, the tool exports a 10,000 mention bulk CSV file. When dealing with larger brands like Nike, you are looking at well over 300K posts for a year. Parallel to this, is the lack of an exportable sample of data.
- Each widget can only showcase 3 months worth of data. So creating a trend line of volume of mentions must be done in 3 separate widgets and requires the user to manually piece them together.
- Though the tool consistently brings back the most volume, the data is not always clean. Within the data crawl, twitter user names are also scraped for your kewords, so going back to the above example, if your keyword is nike, and someone's twitter handle is @IhateNike, the post is often irrelevant to the brand.
- Though I find the tool quite easy to use, new users often tell me that the tool is incredibly confusing and not an intuitive process.
- Lack of Facebook posts, though this is a limitation of all social monitoring tools given the privacy settings of the social network
- Lacking the ability to input Boolean Syntax limits the depth of the keyword queries.
March 31, 2014
Apps made easy
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- It makes creating Facebook applets really easy, it takes away the the hassle of doing all that work on Facebook itself.
- Customizing is a pain, or I should say used to be. The support team is great and tried to help me with whatever issue I had but some features were just missing back then
March 31, 2014
General Feedback
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- The workflow is fantastic. It made the process of handling clients/potential clients smooth.
- Training at initial set-up.
February 05, 2014
Buddy Media Review (Before & After Acquisition)
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Clear, concise functions and navigation. The ease of use was a strong-selling point.
- Assigning tasks to different users within your team was simple and hassle-free.
- Analytics were top level, easily digestible and actionable.
- Deep analytic capabilities still lacking.
- Still primarily an engagement platform, only. The added components of analytics, sentiment analysis, and NLP are a far ways away.
- Salesforce acquisition caused disconnect when it comes to persona/reliable customer service.
January 29, 2014
Buddy Media Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Monitors online conversations around brand, industry and/or competitors or any other topic profile that is built.
- It aggregates the online data and allows users to see the most popular topics, words being used in social. This is a great way to gather online intelligence.
- You can build integrated campaigns across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, saving time and ensure campaign consistency.
- It really needs the Salesforce.com integration to tie social activity to contacts.
- This integration would allow customers to show the ROI of this product.
January 23, 2014
Radian6 review
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Searches for everything within the filter search.
- Has to ability to block blogs.
- Linking direct to the site where the post is listed.
- When searching have the ability to mute certain users.
- Being able to flag abusive users.