Need an analytics person on staff to reap full value.
November 12, 2012

Need an analytics person on staff to reap full value.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Radian6 (legacy)

Overall Satisfaction with Radian6

  • 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.
  • The software does a fantastic job of letting us understand who are top social supporters are. It would be impossible to understand this without Radian6. We now know who shares our content and helps us grow virally. Knowing who these people are is crucial to the success of the organization. Our marketing team understands who among our supporters can help us grow, and which messages resonate the most.

Using Radian6

5 - • We have five logins. Mainly used by our social media manager and some members of the digital marketing team (to promote marketing campaigns)
• Usage varies a bit depending on the phases we are in. For example, during campaign execution and analysis, we use the tool daily. Otherwise we check metrics about once a week. We also use the tool heavily at month end for reporting and analysis.
  • We use the tool mainly to monitor what is being said about us and to indentify who our top influencers are. We really want to know who is tweeting about our campaigns, sharing our content etc. Once we have identified top influencers, we reach out to them for engagement using other channels (email / blogs).
  • In a nutshell, we use the tool to ID our brand promoters. The software definitely helps us to solve the problem we purchased it to solve. The only real problem is on our side. We do not have adequate resources to really analyze the data that Radian 6 returns and build appropriate communication and engagement strategies to better target these people. We simply don’t have enough people to really parse the data.
  • We use a different tool for scheduling tweets / FB posts (Small Act Thrive).
• Pretty likely to renew. If we can find a single platform that does everything we want to do, we might be tempted to move.

Evaluating Radian6 and Competitors

Not sure. We switched from a different product some years ago.

Radian6 Implementation

Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.

Radian6 Training

• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.

Radian6 Support

• We have a dedicated account rep and he is very capable and helpful. We usually engage through the account rep rather than through support.

Using Radian6

• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.

Integrating Radian6

  • Yes. We are working on integration with Adobe Site Catalyst (Omniture) so that we are doing more than simply tracking mentions but are able to pull web analytics data into Radian 6 so that we can see how much of the social media buzz we are tracking actually results in visits to our website or participation in webinars. We have not actually done this integration yet, but intend to do it using in-house resources.
Yes. Radian6 gave us a guide on how to achieve this and we will build the integration soon.

Relationship with Salesforce

As a nonprofit, we benefit from the 50% nonprofit discount.