Agorapulse vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued)

I think Agora is great for small teams looking to schedule posts and respond to users. I haven't used it at scale, so I can't recommend it for larger companies, but I love it for what we do. If you're savvy with Google Sheets, then the Agora exports are really handy. If you don't need specific data or the ability to compare metrics, and just want a surface-level look at your social performance, the analytics tools are nice.

Incentivized

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

• Calendar sharing - great for internal and external approval
• Community management - it means we can keep on top of engagement for all of our clients in one place
• Report - it's really useful for us to be able to create such in depth reports that we can use internally but also share with clients so they can see the results of what we are doing

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

• Reporting not available for personal accounts
• Adding TikTok
• Ability to tag personal accounts in LinkedIn and FaceBook
• When copying from one platform to another, one has to go and redo the tags or they will not come up properly. If the the @ is the same in the two platforms, it should take that into consideration and not ask to re-enter.

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.

The decision has been made. It's time to get to work--no steps back. I feel confident this product is well suited to help me make progress. I want to get down business and utilize the functionality of this product to meet my marketing goals. I feel very comfortable with the choice I have made.

Incentivized

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

The user interface is fantastic. Clear and easy to use. The layout and navigation is very well thought out enabling us to work quicker, and smarter. Moving around Agorapulse becomes second nature very quickly, which makes day to day workflows so much easier. The features included are comprehensive, especially the reporting. And having everything in one place for messaging and monitoring is a real help

Incentivized

• 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.

Agorapulse occasionally has outages or shuts down. It never interferes with my use of the application or any of my posts

Incentivized

The platform is rarely down

Agorapulse has generally had great performance. Occasionally I have issues with my videos being posted on Instagram. I still am not sure why. the format of the videos is the same as the videos that are going through.

Incentivized

No issues with performance.

Absolutely amazing customer service. Some of it seems very automated and feels like you are not talking to a person. It would be better if it was just a normal email platform that it was coming from. But overall super great customer service and the company is always willing to walk new members through the use of Agorapulse which is awesome.

Incentivized

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.

I did not train in person

Incentivized

The staff walked me through the whole platform and asked me if I had any questions. They were very helpful in answering any questions I had.

Incentivized

• 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.

Be sure of the game play mechanics you need to achieve your objectives, it will help significantly in setting up the game and creating the assets

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.

I think Agorapulse is by far the most comprehensive platform and user-friendly. In my experience, the support on hand is responsive and easy to speak with through the online chat. Hootsuite, Adobe Express, and Buffer seemed limited in what they offer in comparison, particularly Adobe Express and Buffer. Both these platforms were clunkier for us to use and didn't offer as much in terms of listening and reporting. We used Hootsuite a few years ago and moved away from it before we developed our strategy, planning and reporting for social, so it might have the same capabilities as Agorapulse but the support and usability do not match.

Incentivized

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

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by scalability.

Incentivized

• Agorapulse has been able to be the leading platform for us to maintain and grow our client base
• Clients tend to be frustrated with Agorapulse and often have trouble viewing the content leading us to consider other alternatives which would affect our ROI.
• Agorapulse does however, push us to utilize all its features, increase strategy, and in doing so, offer additional competitive packages.

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