Pulsar is a social media monitoring platform offering social listening, owned channels analytics, and social CRM. Customers use Pulsar for brand tracking and campaign measurement.
The platform includes 4 tools:
TRAC: Social media listening across topics, audiences and content diffusion.
CORE: Owned channels analytics to measure your content performance and audience growth.
FLOW: Social customer relationship management and social media publishing.
TEAM: Analyse your internal social networks…
$1,200
150,000 mentions
Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Sysomos was a social media listening and marketing solution for content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics. Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater, and is no longer available, but the features of the former Sysomos are now part of the Meltwater platform.
$1,000
per month
Pricing
Pulsar CORE
Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Editions & Modules
TRAC (starter package)
$1,200
150,000 mentions
Sysomos
$1,000.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Pulsar CORE
Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Prices listed are on a 'starting from' basis. All TRAC packages have unlimited user log-ins, unlimited search queries and are charged on the amount of mentions pulled in.
Bespoke packages are available.
I think that Pulsar is a good tool for brands or agencies who have a set list of competitors or subbrands that they are looking to do a monthly/weekly comparison of engagement metrics. When you have the brand account inputted, the data is shown in a visually tangible way and easy to comprehend.
Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
Sysomos Heartbeat: the proactive social media monitoring software. The dashboard was efficient and minimalist, and provided detailed reporting on where the social conversation was held for each individual hotel. The rich data and the simplicity of the dashboard made this tool particularly useful and easy to implement -- it was also easier to train new employees with the software.
Sysomos Heartbeat: We also used it to keep track of any crisis that arose. The tool made it easy to catch any spikes in conversation that would spread rapidly either across one channel or multiple channels.
Customer Service: Our hotels receive lots of inquiries, requests, payments, and reviews through various social channels. Sysomos helped keep track of them.
Their influencer/klout score algorithm is worthless - it caps out at 10 so the New York Times and Jo Schmo gamer dude and Justin Bieber all have the same score.
The Boolean builder can be frustrating, it will tell you there is an error, but gives you no indication of where. In a complex string it can take forever to figure out what you messed up.
Twitter listening only goes back one year. If you ever need to compare something year over year, without anticipating the need in advance and downloading reports, you're screwed.
There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
Pulsar is not a complex tool by any means. The interface is updated and comprehensive, and I've used multiple tools in the past where the interface was very outdated and exporting data was often a difficult process since it was not well organized. The tool works well in visualizing complex data.
The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
The system is typically pretty fast and easily accesible. Due to contract restrictions, our team sometimes has issues with overlap in usage (we only have one login to share amongst the team).
Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."
I think that Pulsar is one of the more updated platforms that I have used and the metrics exported/shown in the dashboard are accurate. I think that some tools report inaccurate metrics gathered from social media platforms due to the new APIs, something that often causes confusion and lack of clarity.
Sysomos MAP is focused on listening (not management of social media accounts - features exist, but these are not the core purpose). It does a great job of measuring open networks, particularly Twitter, and a good job of monitoring mainstream press sites. For the most part it scales well, and the user-interface is relatively user-friendly, which allows us to decentralize use (important for a very large organization). Not the most expensive of the pack either.
