Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued) vs. Smash Balloon

Social studio is well-suited for environments where multiple social media channels are being managed by more than one individual, allowing for shared access and collaboration. There's no reason it wouldn't work equally as well for an individual user without a team needing shared access.

Incentivized

• Social Listening - boolean search queries that can be narrowed down by source and language, as well as location, to ensure it's relevant to the brand.
• Owned Channel Monitoring - pulling owned content/comments into streams for moderation, engagement and review.
• Publishing - scheduling, drafting, tracking brand owned social posts.

Incentivized

• 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.

Our company's contract with Radian6 was up in January and we came to the unanimous agreement that we would look for another software. For the 18 months we had Radian6, very few employees knew how to use it and we were ready to try something new

• 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.

The platform is rarely down

No issues with performance.

As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.

• 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.

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 is one of the popular social media monitoring tools, There are many features of the Radian6 that I can vote for over other tools. The important ones are the seamless Salesforce integration, The data presentation capabilities, Multiple profiles feature, keyword cloud. Despite the fact that the license is costly, the features and the integrations(specially SFDC) provided are very handful and worth the money.

Incentivized

• Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
• Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
• If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.

Incentivized