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
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- 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).
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(1-25 of 28)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
April 17, 2018
Radian6 - Monitoring of Social Media
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.
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
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.
August 01, 2017
Social Studio - Good Basic Tool, but Expensive
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.
April 22, 2016
Radian6: measurements and insights
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.
January 06, 2016
Radian6 - The Gold Standard for The Enterprise
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
January 17, 2014
Buddy Media Great Resource
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have used Buddy Media for several years in our social media department at AXS Television. At AXS we aimed to have deeper conversations with our customers and Buddy Media made it possible to create a relationship with those customers. Our department had 3 Twitter and Facebook pages that we had to maintain everyday and we aimed to post 12 or so times a day, without Buddy Media that would have been near impossible to do. Buddy Media especially became handy during our live concerts that we would live tweet along with our viewers and the band.
- Buddy Media was always reliable, especially during the times when we could not have an employee manning out Twitter or FB. We knew we could create engaging posts that would go out on time and gather the attention we needed.
- There were a few times when several posts would need to be created and schedule and Buddy Media would scramble them up and not keep them in order. Though the post always went out when needed, it was very hard to keep track of a post if it was scheduled for 9:00am, but fell under an 11:00pm post.
January 17, 2014
Radian6 is a solid tool that sets you up for success!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
At CDW, we use Radian6 as our "listening tool" for mentions of our brand, products and competitors. Radian6 is used mostly with the Social Media Project Management team and Customer Service. With the Customer Service organization we are looking for "cries" for help or customers that may be experiencing a negative customer experience with our company. We have been able to indentify when pricing issues were taking place on our website my monitoring tweets, step in on blogs where customers were voicing opinions and experiences about our company, and even thank posted who would post positive recognition about our organization. For us, the main problems it addresses are the most urgent when customers aren't recieving calls back from our co-workers or not getting their desired resolution. The Social web allows customers an easy outlet to get help instead of calling a call center or sending an email. Radian6 helps us get access to those posts right away rather than waiting for a customer to have time to stop and email or call. Not to mention, the marketing tool that it creates for our customer service. People see us posting back publically to these posters, offering our services and wanting to help. Radian6 helps us maintain our presense of wanting to provide an unmatched customer experience to all of our customers.
- Weeding out posts that don't pertain to CDW. We are able to set up filters that allow us to avoid seeing clutter from other posters.
- Allowing direct access to the post from the portal. When a tweet comes accross with a CDW mention - the ability to click and access the site it is posted on is key for maintaining productivity and insuring our response gets out to the customer quickly.
- There are sites where CDW has presense that Radian6 is not able to tap into to include in their search. This causes us to have to run separate searches on individual sites. It would be great if Radian6 could really be our "one stop shop" to searching all of the web for mentions of our organization.
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
The answers you need from social media...
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Radian6 is helpful in locating target audiences by allowing the user to set a wide variety of preferences. This is hugely important to the interest of saving time.
- Radian6 has evolved to display results in graphs that make it easy for viewers (at all levels) to interpret. This cuts down on the extra work you have to do in order to present your finidings to clients and/or executives.
- Perhaps most useful, Radian6 quickly and accurately analyses trends. It really takes some of the guessing work out of crowd listening and allows the most up-to-date information to shine through the noise.
- I was honestly able do to what I needed to do (and more) with the platform the way it is...
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Radian6 simplified tracking social media data for specific projects you or your client was working on and the reports were a great tool to drill down into the data.
- Radian6 offered great tools and widgets to understand what coverage you were getting and what others were saying about you on a specific topic.
- The entire Radian6 dashboard was user-friendly and easy to navigate, and there was always something new to learn!
- If you saw a spike in content you can use the topic cloud to find the keyword that caused the spike and look at the interaction of your community. Great way to really get the cause of increased mentions
- I remember that setting up topic profiles was a bit of a chore, especially if you had a longer list of terms. Adding items one by one was one thing I didn't like and should be improved.
October 24, 2013
Radian6 - Your Reporting All-Star
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Radian6 is an industry leader in social media monitoring. In terms of the results returned from the web at large I've always been extremely satisfied. They manage to return just about every company and entity mention out there. The widgets are quick and easy to create and provide C-Level teams with an overview of information they need to know while letting those using the tool daily dig deep into the data. It's the best of both worlds. I will say if you aren't used to a dashboard tool the setup and creation of this will be a bit of a learning curve but nothing you can't handle with the support of their customer service team.
- The profile setup is relatively easy although when it comes to clearing out spam results from Facebook it is a bit of a manual process. This is out of Radian's control as it is an API issue on Facebook's part.
- I find their proprietary influencer tool isn't very helpful or accurate. You can change influencer attribute settings in the report and it does give you results however it isn't fully comprehensive. Instead we use the tool to monitor conversations and hashtags to identify influencers.
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.
October 09, 2013
Buddy Media Self Serve Review (Social.com)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- After testing many Facebook self serve APIs, Buddy Media was unparalleled in ease of use, campaign segmentation and creation, creative rotation and swapping, and most of all in optimizing.
- The campaign creation user flow is one thing varies from tool to tool, however Buddy Media has really nailed it on the head with regards to scalability and granularity for reporting and optimizing.
- The visual widgets available not only allow for quick, actionable insights, but they also allow for optimizations to be made in real time within these widgets and charts, allowing those actionable insights to be actions immediately. For those familiar with Facebook advertising, you know how important turn around time is when optimizing.
- Like with any new product, there were some bugs with some of the ad units getting targeting stripped or creating empty shell ads. The tech team was very proactive in alleviating these issues and getting to the bottom of it. However relative to the volume of ads that we were turning out on a daily basis I would say these issues were minimal, however recurring.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- If your company needs a complex role-based permission set for seeding social posts, scheduling, work flow, Buddy is pretty good.
- What used to be leading edge on deploying engagement widgets (aka sapplets) has become too cumbersome for simple deployments, usually requiring help from Buddy to put it together.
- Since being bought by SalesForce and marketed as a bundle with Radian6, they force you into the bundle when nothing is integrated, not even billing.
- Buddy along with most platforms in this category are still using number of social accounts as the threshold for increases in costs. When this is taken to scale for large brands like QSR's this is not a feasible or cost effective solution. This puts Buddy in direct conflict with Facebook and G+'s move towards hyper local (which by the way other than reviews I'm against)
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Localized, keyword, social media monitoring
- The product had lot of "noise" despite filters; no easy integration with social intranet and natural employee workflow; standalone system.
- We needed a tool that integrated with our social intranet (in this case Jive).
- Additionally, we wanted workflow capability that would provide a clear process for all employees to follow, and not something we would have to buy an individual license for every user. It was crucially important to collect and filter the data, and then assign it to the right people within the organization to respond.