Meltwater

Pros

Meltwater is one of the top media databases for PR professionals

Cons

No media database is perfect in terms of either staying current with media members and/or as it relates to media monitoring. Can be expensive in terms of number of seats and/or tools used.

Pros

The dashboard for easy monitoring of our media and social coverage.

Cons

They charge separate pricing for everything, and it seems that every time I turn around they're rolling out a cool new feature they want to share, but it's always extra.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Meltwater

Reasons for Switching to Meltwater

Pros

The social listening / social media analysis tool was helpful (before we switched products)!

Cons

I didn't love the user experience of Meltwater–it didn't feel overly intuitive.

Pros

The platform seemed to deliver daily "monitoring" alerts on a daily schedule as promised. While not worth anything to our organization, the emails did come every day as promised.

Cons

As a product/platform, Meltwater was an overpriced, worse alternative to Google alerts and provided no semblance of quality monitoring results for our organization. Their reputation monitoring tool returned highly unrelated results from a majority of click-bait, AI-generated SEO websites. I can't think of how many times our team would look at the "alert" emails and laugh at both the quality of the results followed by the obscureness of the websites it was pulling content from. Separately, we set up basic Google Alerts along with Hootsuite and a handful of other free/inexpensive social media monitoring alerts, and the info from there was far better in quality and delivery than what we had received from Meltwater.In fairness, Meltwater was deployed by legacy employees who did not have a full breadth of understanding of the platform's purpose or potential. However, it appears that there was minimal, if any, implementation and launch support and/or validation from the Meltwater team that the monitoring results were what we were looking for.

Pros

The CRM tool is amazing at collating and managing all social media into a chronological timeline.

What I like most about this software is the interface. Very fluid and modern and easy on the eyes. It is also user-friendly, I was able to upskill many agents within 2 days maximum.

Cons

I do feel that the reporting could be a bit more specific or customisable. Especially when pulling agent reports, there is some information which I would like to see which is not there, so perhaps allowing a more in-depth customisable report functionwould be beneficial.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Meltwater

Pros

A fairly robust way of gathering all the news about our industry, company, and competitors all in one place. Quick setup after a couple of calls with our representative.

Cons

the boolean logic strings are difficult to configure at first. We had issues with languages/news that had nothing to do with our industry. Not easily possible to laser-in on the information that we would find relevant for mass distribution. They need to make some enhancements as the UI seems dated, and at times difficult to navigate.

Pros

Since I have been using meltwater for the past two year my favorite feature is the X (Twitter) analytics dashboard that gives us an analysis of mentions with demographic data on age gender and RT QT and many more apart from that the buzz alerts where in if there is a surge in mention it notified us via mail and in tool

Cons

What irritates me the most are the data download limit which limit to downloading 20K data at a time and the tool laggy interface which makes it lag more when the internet is slow

Pros

the deep analytics provided
Segregation of data city/state/country wise
different verticals and sections for campaign, monitoring, and others

Cons

to provide ease use of keywords, some social listening rules such as use of capital alphabets in boolean operators have been bended, but in long term, the professionals of this vertical can be affected due to this

Pros

I really like this platform, it's easy to use and it allows me to get valuable information about the performance of my campaigns and better understand my audience.

Cons

Well the price can be quite high for some businesses or independent professionals.

Pros

I like the social media analytics tools that allow me to monitor the online conversations that are impacting my brand and industry.

Cons

It would be ideal to have a higher update speed to be able to make more agile decisions.

Pros

We were able to work together more efficiently thanks to Meltwater, and we were able to locate the information we required from social media platforms with greater ease because of the organization provided by the tool. Meltwater's search function is quite adaptable, providing us with a plethora of alternatives for precise tracking of what we're looking for, where we can simply prepare the topic that we're waiting for to be published, and when it's published on social media. To make sure we're always on the ball, Meltwater will provide us alerts instantly. Meltwater has a fantastic knack for laying down the information gathered in a way that is simple to understand for anyone.

Cons

While the simplistic nature of Meltwater's charts is a source of frustration for me, I have faith that the Meltwater will make efforts to enhance them in future versions.

Pros

The thoroughness of coverage and the reach is far larger than other products and the ability to customize searches, add viewers

Cons

a few typos in search criteria setup from prior account managers - but nothing that affects its usability

Pros

Meltwater collects media information for me

Cons

I personally haven't had any issues with meltwater

Pros

The daily reports directly in my inbox are super convenient.

Cons

Twitter appears a lot on the reports, which is important because people are very vocal there.
But sometimes the reports show every single re-tweet in a huge disorganized list.
It would be great if the original tweet could be at the top, and all the duplicate re-tweets would only appear if we chose to 'expand' a list

Pros

I worked for a large automotive company and moved from NetBase to Sysomos due to cost and ease of use. Sysomos is certainly easy to use and fulfills the basic needs of a small to medium size business - I don't think it's ideal if you have to dive into analytics and provide in depth numbers. If that's the case, Sysomos is not for you.

Cons

I found that Sysomos wasn't delivering the analytics that execs were looking for and there was a lot of manual work that went into it.

The content planning side of the software seemed promising until I had to use it daily and dealt with glitches of the screen freezing or not being able to scroll up/down. When presenting content to client and using Sysomos, I was embarrassed.

Training was not great, there were so many things he missed out on and we found out later on that we were not using the software to it's absolute fullest due to poor training.

Pros

These types of tools are somewhat of a necessary evil in the PR space when it comes to looking up media contacts. Meltwater is no worse than its competitors and about half the time will have the accurate, current contact information of the relevant reporter we are looking for.

Cons

Unfortunately the other half of the time, there is no specific contact information or publications are not even logged in the Meltwater databases. Often, every contact at a specific publication will be listed with the same generic contact email that's listed on the publication's website, making Meltwater's services essentially useless. User is also quite clunky to just be able to search for media outlets/contacts.

Pros

Thanks to its reporting and analysis, I can create a strategy for myself by looking at the data and this application is free. Fantastic!

Cons

The application is not fast enough and there are delays.

Pros

It's a great, easy to set up and easy to use platform, even if you're only using some of the features occasionally. In a small team it's really important to be able to utilise time effectively and this is a great tool to achieve that and cost effective too.

Cons

Nothing really - it's easy to use and great for what our organisation currently needs.

Pros

Meltwater is fairly intuitive to use, though their reps will walk you through everything.

Cons

Seems there's always something new they want you to buy.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

Meltwater is user-friendly and a huge help in monitoring media coverage for our clients. I can also add missing articles very easily to added content for each client on the board searches.

Cons

The algorithm for searching each client can be difficult at first but by call your representative, they will go through the best algorithm for your client so, you can find media coverage with ease.

Pros

I have used several different social listening tools out there, and this is my favorite for many reasons. It's simple, customizable, visually appealing and provides meaningful results.

Cons

The customer service could be improved. With other tools, I have had a dedicated team who checks in with me, etc.

Pros

I love the ease of setting up and using this product. It's very visually pleasing and useful for supporting the overall life of a hashtag and event. The reporting is detailed and it's easy to see how far messages travel, and the impact it has within your audience.

Cons

I didn't love the customer service at first but it got better as we complained. I also think it could build in some more exportable quick reporting to help diversify the platform but it's restricted to what it can get from APIs from the various social networks.

Pros

Meltwater provides an in-depth media monitoring service with excellent analytics for reporting. I use Meltwater daily and having an automated media monitoring service with a personal account manager and live chat function is a great asset.

Cons

Customer service response times and reliability start to slow down during busy periods, like towards end-of-year reporting which can be quite frustrating.

Pros

Super easy to use; mobile and desk top; can set auto-alerts

Cons

The price is a little high; setting up the searches was fairly tedious but they help you through it.

Pros

Social listening tools are useful once you set them up. The insights for social media platforms are useful

Cons

Social listening tools are great in principle, but you need a comprehensive understanding of boolean search parameters, and although we were offered support from our account manager, this didn't actually come about