Radian6 - Strengths and Weaknesses but Still at the Top
Updated October 30, 2014
Radian6 - Strengths and Weaknesses but Still at the Top
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Radian6 (legacy)
Overall Satisfaction with Radian6
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.
Radian6 offers the most comprehensive categorization while also covering the rest of what we need reasonably well. Every other tool I've evaluated has its strength, but Radian6 just ticks off more boxes across the board.
Using Radian6
6 - Social media monitoring and engagement.