Why Radian6 Might Not Be For You
May 14, 2014
Why Radian6 Might Not Be For You
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Radian6 (legacy)
Overall Satisfaction with Radian6
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.
- I would actually say that Radian6 decreased our efficiency as a team because it took so much time and effort to train people on how to use it.
- Radian6 helped us understand the overall sentiment of our brand. This gave us great insight and helped us structure our online customer service strategy.
- Hootsuite Free,Meltwater Buzz,Meltwater News,Simply Measured,Sprout Social
Compared to Radian6, I found Meltwater Buzz, Simply Measured, and Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Meltwater Buzz and Radian6 are very similar products with many of the same functionalities but Buzz presents your analytics in a way that is much easier to understand. I did a two week trial with Sprout Social and absolutely loved the product but our company needed the capability to connect to Salesforce, which is available on R6 and Buzz. Simply Measured is my all time favorite but I have only used the free version so I am not completely sure how it stacks up to Radian6.