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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Formerly Radian6 + Buddy Media

Overview

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.

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Recent Reviews
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Popular Features

View all 27 features
  • Content planning and scheduling (10)
    10.0
    100%
  • Broad channel coverage (10)
    10.0
    100%
  • Twitter (10)
    9.0
    90%
  • Workflow management (10)
    8.0
    80%
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Pricing

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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
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Features

Listening/monitoring

Using complex keyword searches to surface insights from social media conversations.

8.5
Avg 7.6

Publishing

Scheduling posts to various social media channels and profiles from one interface.

8.5
Avg 7.9

Engagement

Engaging with customers and responding to comments and inquiries via social media channels.

7.6
Avg 8.1

Marketing

Using the software to increase customer engagement and grow customer base via social media channels.

5.5
Avg 7.7

Channel coverage/integration

Effective integration with social media networks, including the ability to monitor, publish and respond.

8.1
Avg 8.5

Reporting/analytics

8.6
Avg 7.8

Account management

Users can manage access to multiple social media accounts.

9.5
Avg 8.2
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Product Details

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) Technical Details

Deployment TypesSoftware as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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).
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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
Adam Keys | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Social Studio was used by ScS for Social Listening, scheduling and content creation. The platform did everything it advertised, and I had no issues during my time using the platform, allowing us seamless posting to social when out of the office, and first class competitor monitoring, without breaking the bank.
  • Social listening / competitor monitoring
  • Scheduling
  • Instagram integration
  • Reliability
  • Usability - clunky to use
Social listening/competitor monitoring. Social Studio allows you to track competitor keywords within the cost of the package. Other platforms, including Hootsuite, charge a large sum for this. This is very useful for continuous improvement. Scheduling - plan ahead, knowing your posts will publish without error when you're out of the office.
Mahesh Aluvala | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Radian6 product software for one of the world leading organization who are in Fortune 500, we helped them implement the product. In the current time, social media has become one of the important aspects of any business success. To understand the social buzz and the social trends better, the radian6 was a great choice. Over the course of implementation, we loved the product and the results it has yielded us. The primary focus was to understand where are we stand and how to improve the brand.
  • 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.
Radian6 has good capabilities for social monitoring and measuring. Any Org who wants to listen the real facts stated directly out from the crowd, this is a great tool.
Jeremy Cowles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As Social Studio has capabilities for scheduling and publishing as well as analysis, it is being used by both the marketing department (for monitoring mentions of the company in the media and scheduling of organic brand posting) and the insight team who primarily use the analysis functionality. For the marketing team it appears to be a good solution for ticking multiple boxes in-one, particularly publishing and engaging, while for the insight team the analytics piece helps us keep tabs on multiple brand searches in the media in order to evaluate marketing performance.
  • 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
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
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Social Studio is being used by the marketing organization to manage social media channels, including for scheduling posts and analysis. It simplifies social media management.
  • Scheduling posts
  • Tracking social media metrics
  • Analysis
  • Doesn't allow you to tag other users/accounts in scheduled posts.
Social studio is well-suited for environments where multiple social media channels are being managed by more than one individual, allowing for shared access and collaboration. There's no reason it wouldn't work equally as well for an individual user without a team needing shared access.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Radian6 to monitor the social media buzz of our brands in the local market. It's very important for us to keep monitoring what's been said about us in general and specifically when we run local campaigns to know the social media impact and reach of our actions. Also in critical scenarios, it helps us to spot when and where we need to act.
  • 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.
Well suited: Keep tracking of your social media brand presence, social media buzz, monitor hundred of bloggs, monitor PR mentions online, etc,
Less appropiate: small business and profesionall due to cost model.
Andrea Casano | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Social Studio, AKA Radian6, was initially implemented and used in our company for a big data project; also connected to the decoupling of the social profiles of our customers. After the project was closed, it was mainly used by ICT and commercial communication department to monitor some social indicators and to support the [marketing] plan.
  • 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
Social Studio would be great for studying all the metrics associated with your social and digital properties. It can be a valid help to schedule your posts and to evaluate their impact on your followers or on your customers. Obviously, [being] associated with the Salesforce family products, it will allow you to integrate insights across different platforms. If you need specific information related to your property on Facebook, the platform offered by the same book would be more useful.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Social Studio is being used by the organization I work for. It is being used by each property's marketing department so that social boosts are individualized for all properties while still being reviewed by corporate for quality assurance purposes.
  • 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
I feel as if social studio is well suited for scheduling posts; however, it would be more beneficial if it chose when to schedule posts (i.e. general weekly postings) based on when you had the most followers online for all social media. SMART technology should be added to the program.
Jimmy Mack | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used Social Studio to monitor our brand presence on social media, as well as benchmark our social presence against our main competitors. We also used it to determine trending topics, discover what pieces of our content were resonating with our audience and generate high level reports for our executives, from VPs up to the president of the company.
  • 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.
If you need some very basic analytics from a fairly good listening tool that has publishing capabilities to multiple platforms, Social Studio is a good tool for you. The publishing capabilities are probably the strongest aspect of the tool, while the analytics within the tool are certainly the weakest aspect of Social Studio. For the lack of advanced analytics, I think Social Studio is priced a bit too high, comparatively speaking.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use social studio in the client services department of our organization - in some cases, we are the account holder and in others we are simply users. For a payroll brand, we utilize both social studio and its counter-part, Radian 6. It allows us to do advanced social listening and modify the boolean searches to our liking - ensuring that we're only getting relevant chatter. This content pulls into streams, creating an efficient checklist and workflow for the social teams on the front line.
  • 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.
Social Studio is great for owned channels and social listening - its Boolean queries allow for true personalization. Social Studio does not work well for Instagram, or if you're looking to track social influencers easily. This would work well for brands who are looking to do web-wide searches of related content - such as auto brands etc. But would not work well for small owned businesses looking for content on a lower-profile basis.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used to Social Studio to schedule all of our social media content on Facebook and Twitter. It was only used by our marketing department. It helped me, as the social media manager, keep track of our social calendar and our engagement. It also allowed my managers to keep an eye on our calendar.
  • 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.
Social Studio is great for an organization that manages many social media accounts. Not just one Facebook and one Twitter, but several Twitter accounts and several Facebook accounts. It is not as well suited for organization with a large media library they would like integrated into their social media scheduling platform.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
When I used Radian6 it was being used by one department/division. It addressed our need for measuring analytics on our social media and digital efforts. We used it to see how we measured up to competitors, and how we could better utilize content to reach our audiences. Radian6 helped us see who was talking about us, and where and when they were talking about us.
  • 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.
I think Radian6 is great if you need a platform that will create reports for your business and allow you to export and share those reports. It's a little pricey so it's best for larger companies that can afford the robust tool. It's less appropriate for monitoring social or other online efforts.
Sharon Suchoval | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Radian6 is used across the company to provide research to enterprise clients. The companies we monitor have thousands of mentions daily on social media and blogs. It allows us to identify trends (both positive and negative) before they become too big to manage.
  • 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.
Radian6 is extraordinary for companies that have a lot of mentions in multiple places. It takes a large amount of information and consolidates it into a usable form. It is less appropriate for smaller businesses that don't have a lot of conversations happening.
Nicole Swanson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Social Studio allows us to manage publishing, moderations and enquiries on our social media channels. We are also able to listen to conversations about our brand on other public social media channels. The reporting features allow us to analyse our efforts on our own channels and keep track of conversations on external channels. The ability to create numerous user accounts with different access levels and assign engage or publish access, along with approval rules for publishing really helps share the load for social media content creation. The ability to assign enquiries to other users and follow up on workflow through the system is also extremely useful in managing customer service workflow.
  • 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)
If there is only one person managing social media within the organisation, then the features of social studio would be under-utilised and therefor the cost may be unwarranted. But if you have anyone else supporting customer service or content creation, this is a great platform.
March 18, 2015

Review of Radian6

Derrick Lane | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Radian6 allows us insight into identifying potential brand evangelists for our business by targeting relevant keywords. Our strategy was to use these brand evangelists to help build the brand.
  • 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.
I would not recommend Radian6 if the colleague was on a limited budget.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Social Studio for posting all of our content to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. I collaborate with two agencies and having a single interface to work from has increased efficiency and improved the coordination of our efforts. Our support team from SFDC is very strong and they work with us weekly to address any issues and demonstrate best uses and any new features.
  • 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.
For me, this is best suited for scheduling out all posts and tweets so there is a single source for tracking, reporting and the event calendar. When selecting a tool like Social Studio, you need to be clear on the use and expected outcomes. Currently, Paid social activity cannot be managed through Social Studio, so if that is a big part of what you need to schedule and track you need to decide if Social Studio is the right solution for you.
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.
Nolan Perry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
While Salesforce SRM/CRM tools are being implemented across my organization for use in various departments for customer-facing roles, my review will focus on our use for social media monitoring and engagement. We have a team of seven community managers currently using Radian6 to monitor three Twitter accounts. Also note that this review covers the Radian6 Engagement Console, not their new web version, Social Studio, which is currently in development and launch.
  • 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.
I think Radian6 is best suited to large organizations with multiple social accounts to monitor. Also, if you don't need a lot of categorization for tracking social data yet, it's overkill.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Radian6 has been used for social listening. It is used by the Analytics Department and Consumer Insight Department as well. It address the topics around the brand that raise attention. It also tells us the effect of our social and TV campaigns.
  • 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.
How accurate is the result? How user friendly is the interface? And the cost of course.
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I used Radian6 as a social media manager at a mid-sized company (250-300 employees). Radian6 comes with two key features: a listening platform and an engagement console. The engagement console was only available on a desktop and could not be accessed online, which I found strange and inconvenient. Configuring the listening platform isn't intuitive and several of my coworkers found it confusing to understand. Radian6 allows you to build your own pages with widgets which could have been great, except the widgets didn't fit properly on the screen so things end up looking unorganized and chaotic. I suggest attending their five part webinar series if you're struggling with setting up your account. It especially helped me understand the reporting and analytics portion. The largest hurdle we faced as a company using this software was identifying the right keywords to track, other than our company name, products, and competitors. If your keywords are too broad you will bring in too many search results and exceed your data limit. Radian6 may be a good solution for a bigger company, but it was not the right fit for ours.
  • 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.
Radian6 is a pricey software that is also almost too comprehensive. It could be a considerable option for an enterprise-level organization, but definitely overkill for small to mid- sized companies.
May 06, 2014

Radian6 review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Radian6 for a social media monitoring engine. It is primarily used within our department, though in addition to cross department projects, we will get one off requests. Our department is the only in the company that does have direct access to the tool. Because we are the insights group (research), Radian6, along with other monitoring agents, serve as the base for our report. We use third party aggregators, like Radian6, to capture the universe of conversation pertaining to a set of keywords and then analyze and report on the data.
  • 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.
Radian6 in my opinion is a very no-nonsense type of tool. I know what I am going to get. So in a sense of where it is best suited, I feel as though it is best suited for clients that need a basic read on volume for their brand as well as spikes in conversation over the last 3 months. Radian lacks an automated analysis that is usable. As with other tools, automated sentiment tends to be crap. When comparing to Sysomos, I tend to lead on Radian more because I see them as similar tools though Radian gives me more information. Sysomos has an influencer/'authoritative' portion that the basic Radian tool seems to lack, however, from prior vendor conversations (Im not sure if they have changed it since), Sysomos' was primarily based on twitter followers.
March 31, 2014

Apps made easy

Paul Theunis | TrustRadius Reviewer
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.
No other information to add. Happy with the product.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It was used to both facilitate and schedule Social Media content across multiple departments within the company. More specifically, between Digital, Editorial, and Marketing functions, this tool allowed for synchronization and efficiency in planning of social content. The analytics features allowed for quick, easy to read top-level insights that could be digested across various levels of expertise.
  • 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.
For an an engagement and publishing tool that is highly efficient, easy to set up, and simple to manage - Buddy Media excels. For strategic, digitally-advanced, and analytic teams, the social listening needs that Buddy Media offers seem to lack to those of other proficient vendors in the space. Overall, it is an affordable solution for all management and content-driven functions within an organization.
January 29, 2014

Buddy Media Review

Cynthia Bynum | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I provided marketing consulting services for clients who were looking to implement this product and we used it at our management consulting company, Bluewolf.
  • 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.
It is well suited for global brands that have a high volume of online conversations. It doesn't support SMB's as well.
January 23, 2014

Radian6 review

Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Radian6 is being used by our customer relations dept. to monitor customer compaints via social media. We log into Radian6 and filter through the posts to see if any pertain to the issues. For example we can see if a customer tweets about CDW in a positve or negative way
  • 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.
It's difficult when users use the company name and you can't mute them because they use the company name
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