Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (discontinued) vs. Vista Social

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

When you start working with Vista Social, every major feature is well documented and has an intuitive onboarding with helpful steps. So is a good feature by itself when scaling your team is needed. The other one, on a similar line, is the live preview of the post, which helped us fine tuning the posts quickly and with no surprises. In my experience with the platform —I haven’t come across anything that didn’t do what it was supposed to.

• 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 design and layout of the site is simple, with the options to click through the different tools on the left hand side of the page. What I liked most about Vista Social is the ability to combine all the different tools that a social media manager needs into one platform.
• I typically use various different apps and platforms to write down notes, assign tasks to different team members, and look at my overall content calendar for the month. It is brilliant that Vista Social is able to combine all of these into one platform.
• When first signing up to Vista Social and exploring the platform, each page offers you a walkthrough of all of the tools available to you, which is really handy, as well as a customer support section on the right bottom hand corner.

• 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.

• I think the price is quite high compared to hiring a person for the same task. This may put one off from purchasing as with a bit more time you can do the same job yourself or with an employee for much less
• In my opinion, the interface is rather complicated visually and doesn't have an appeal. It is cramped with so many features that provide a sense of confusion whilst starting off
• In my experience, the tutorials do leave a few questions afterwards regarding set up and this can take more time to figure out by yourself.

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

Very effective, efficient and an integral part of our daily work. Our team members are more productive and motivated to finish projects.

• 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.

It's just perfect in all point because you have everything to manage your business. Keypoint is really message automatisation cause you can send message and take your time on an another point. The fact to schedule your post is also a very good point and very usefull on LinkedIn bye exemple.

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

While they all offer basic scheduling and publishing, Vista Social stands out by combining content creation (with Canva), AI-powered captions, inbox management, task organization, and performance tracking , all in one platform. It saves time and gives me more control, without needing to jump between multiple tools.

• 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

• The DM automation feature means we're not missing out on important messages when we're off the clock (after hours essentially), which is a huge advantage in hospitality where response time is everything.
• In most cases, time is money, and being able to manage all our platforms from one place has cut down hours of switching between apps and tabs. That in itself has boosted our company's productivity and allowed the team to respond faster to guests and potential leads.
• The real-time insights and mentions helps us tweak content and react to trends quicker, which has increased our visibility and bookings.