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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews
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June 11, 2019
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 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
April 13, 2018
Jack of all trades, master of none
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
March 16, 2018
Social Studio, great for scheduling and analysis
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.
April 05, 2017
Social Studio is competent
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.
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)
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
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.
September 12, 2014
Radian6 Experience over the past 3 years
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.
May 14, 2014
Why Radian6 Might Not Be For You
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.
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.
February 05, 2014
Buddy Media Review (Before & After Acquisition)
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.
December 02, 2013
Radian6 - Robust and Powerful
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Radian6 captures a ton of sources across the internet.
- Very robust system.
- After being purchased by Salesforce.com, I know that their level of personalized customer support fell off a bit. I had become friends with a good amount of the folks over there, but now most of them have left due to culture change.
- Difficult to use if you are not savvy with tech.
- Sentiment analysis was off a bit. We had to manually correct sentiment tags that were clearly wrong.
- Pretty expensive.
November 05, 2013
Radian6 Review
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Incorporates tons of data, but allows for control of what and how much.
- Has great data output for additional analysis.
- Robust and allows for a large number of social accounts.
- It is geared for industries where there is a large amount of chatter on social media. Not a good fit for the company I was at while using it.
- Very easy to screw up data via the use of keyword hierarchies.
- At times the platform was overly complex and really required a team of 3-5 minimum to get full use of it.
November 02, 2013
Radian6 Review from an ex-agency side analyst
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Sentiment Analysis - Radian6 does a good job of gathering and categorizing data from various social media channels. It also has a convenient export option that allows you to manipulate the data using your own external tools.
- Social Listening - Radian6 is useful for brands that want to know the impact of a campaign in real time. Especially to answer questions like "Is our target audience responding the way we anticipated?"
- Social Media Marketing - Radian6 is useful when planning a social media campaign or any integrated marketing plan which involves social media.
- Quality Control.
- Price.
- Multiple User Access.
October 28, 2013
New Results with Radian6
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Understanding what consumers are saying about a product or campaign.
- Understanding sentiment.
- Finding advocates and influencers.
- Better beginners guide.
- Better examples of the types of analysis that can be done.
- New features.
October 21, 2013
What was once a great tool, now feels neglected and unloved
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Viewing data in a variety of formats and the ability to easily drill down into this data.
- Evolving - since the Salesforce merger in particular, the platform has hardly been updated and as a result is slow and cumbersome.
- The data tables can take a while to upload, which often makes it feel clunky.
- The tool cannot be used for engagement, despite the 'engagement console'. You cannot schedule content or post easily. Even dealing with inbound messages via this is overly complicated and the big application is slow - this is not browser based, but a standalone application you need to download and install. When using as a part of a team, the permissions are painful to set up as are the dashboards. There is also a delay in messages coming into the dashboard - around 5-10 minutes, meaning that it is no good for real-time engagement. It also frequently misses tweets.
- Communication/account management - all poor and not what you would expect from such a high cost platform. You can expect not to hear from an account manager for months at a time, plus they change frequently.
- Mention limits - this feels like an old-fashioned pricing model and as such greatly limits you on what you can actually track and therefore the benefit you can actually take from the system. To increase mentions, you will be looking at an equally big price hike.
February 12, 2013
Great for Twitter monitoring.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- We appreciate it's twitter results more than it's other functions. Twitter monitoring is acceptable and translates well to measurement reporting in Social.
- Social Brand Analytics, Social monitoring & Competitive Analysis
- FB analytics due to account privacy settings
- Sentiment analysis
December 12, 2012
Doesn't support Arabic keywords!
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Radian6 is the easiest platform to use. User experience is of great quality. Certain analysis and outputs of the platform are yet to be matched by other platforms (such as an analysis of most mentioned hashtags under a campaign)
- Provides data for only 30 days from starting date, but it builds up (day 1 gives you access to 30 days prior. Day 31 gives access to 60 days worth of data)
- Difficult to use 1 campaign (or profile) for more than 1 client (if the intention is to cut costs)
- Not good for Arabic.
November 12, 2012
Need an analytics person on staff to reap full value.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Software is really powerful, but does require some staff members who have a passion for analytics who are able to analyze the data and figure out appropriate engagement strategies. The tool certainly supplied highly relevant data, but it requires someone with an analytics background to spend a considerable portion of their time figuring out what actions to take based on that data.
- Product has a great UI, and is quite flexible, but it is a bit overwhelming. We have only started to scratch the surface of what the platform actually does. There is a lot of functionality that we don’t even use yet.
- Even with the nonprofit discount, the software is still quite expensive and there are limits to the amount of data that we can pull into the system. Pricing plans have data ceilings based on the number of topic profiles and mentions we pull into the system. Exceeding those limits incurs quite a bit of extra cost. For example, we would love to monitor supporters of peer organizations, but it is too expensive for us to do that.
- We use Small Act Thrive for scheduling (and are interested in future functionality from Thrive allowing us to cross-reference social activity with our donor file). However, it would be nice if we could do everything in a single tool. I'm not actually sure if Radian6 allows for scheduling.