Expensive to scale listening. Other tools better for engagement.
April 05, 2013

Expensive to scale listening. Other tools better for engagement.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Radian6 (legacy)

Overall Satisfaction with Radian6

  • 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.
  • brand mentions and awareness tracking
Did a brief evaluation of other tools, but at the time, Radian 6 was the industry leader.
Overall, it was an ok tool for a standalone PR team; however, to do social monitoring across teams, other tools are better. It was also not as good as tools like Spredfast for engagement.

Radian6 is really built for listening to conversations, but Spredfast is built for engaging on the most important items. Radian6 might actually have more advanced listening filters (ie. Language); however, Spredfast is built for taking action, participating on conversations, and sharing relevant materials.

Using Radian6

5 - Marketing
Public Relations
Product Management
Customer Support
  • Social media monitoring
I found an alternative solution to be better (first Jive, and then Spredfast because it has a better listening component and engagement capabilities). Radian 6 was expensive to scale. The B2B company I worked for targeted several industries - ie. robotics, medical device design, automotive. Radian6 charged both by keyword and user. It was impossible to scale due to cost restrictions. Therefore, we could only use the tool to monitor and react to certain product keywords and not proactively to get involved in important conversations in various industries.

Instead we went with a service that integrated with our social intranet. This allowed the social team to quickly find internal experts based on their profiles, host a conversation about the social media post internally, and the publish a response back out. This was better than getting user licenses and training thousands of employees on a tool they may only use a few times a year or trying to manage the social media monitoring process via email.

Evaluating Radian6 and Competitors

I switched from free tools such as Google Alerts and TweetDeck to Radian6.

Radian6 Implementation

This is a SaaS product, so getting the product up and running is quite simple.

Radian6 Training

It was simple and efficient.

Radian6 Support

Couldn't ever help solve our spam issue, although they tried.

Using Radian6

It was simple to use, although the filtering process could be improved. We were never really successful in filtering out SPAM.

Radian6 Reliability

Integrating Radian6

Relationship with Salesforce

# keywords, # users