The Buyers Guide for Social Media Management Software

Trustradius

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• Software
• Médias sociaux

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• Publié par: Fil_HighTechWeb
• Publié le: 04 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 79
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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The Buyers Guide
for Social Media
Management Software
Direct from the Perspectives of End-Users
Curated from End-User Reviews on:
TM
First Published October 21, 2013
By Alan Cooke, Research Director, TrustRadius
TM Page 1 of 25
©TrustRadius Inc. 2013Your Guide To Reading This Report
Why You Should Read This Report
There can be little doubt that social media has entered the business mainstream evolving from a marketing experiment to
an enterprise-wide imperative across many industries. The MIT Sloan Management Review issued a social business research
report earlier this year stating: “Companies are developing more mature social business capabilities by focusing on key business
challenges. Businesses that have more developed social business capabilities don’t view social business solely as an application
or tool. They have integrated it into many functions, such as strategy and operations, and use it in daily decision-making. As a
business solution, social has evolved, moving well beyond the marketing department, to address business objectives across the
organization:
» 65% of respondents use social business tools to understand market shifts.
» 45% turn to it to improve visibility into operations.
1» 45% leverage it to identify internal talent.”
Stanford Business said last year that the world has changed and that “consumers, employees and stakeholders expect to engage
2with companies and their brands through social media”.
In response to this phenomenon, a whole new business software category, Social Media Management Software (SMMS), has
emerged as one of the most dynamic sectors of the business software market.
We broadly define SMMS as a set of tools to manage or analyze interactions through multiple social media accounts from
a single dashboard. Most systems permit listening for brand mentions, posting to multiple channels and running marketing
campaigns. They include analytics packages to measure the relative success of campaigns. Within this broad definition, there are
distinct use cases which emphasize different feature sets and we will discuss these below.
This report is intended to provide practical guidance to SMMS buyers to help identify the solutions most appropriate to their
needs, and to highlight key factors for evaluation. It is directly based upon the insights of end-users of these products, many of
whom are expert users. This is the first in a planned series of category reports, which will be similarly based on user insights.
1. MIT Sloan Management Review Research Report. “Social Business: Shifting Out of First Gear”, 2013.
2. Matteo Taleo MD of The Conference Board, quoted in Stanford Business Social Media Survey, 2012
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©TrustRadius Inc. 2013Why You Can Trust This Report
We analyze the sector using insights directly sourced from in-depth product reviews from a community of professionals who
purchase, implement and use social media management software. These professionals are members of TrustRadius – the leading
online community for professionals to share quality insights about business software through in-depth structured reviews,
discussions and networking.
The report is based upon 100 in-depth user reviews of 36 different SMMS products from users across a broad range of industries.
Most reviews are by social media practitioners at companies of various sizes from large enterprises like Dell, Hertz, the US
Marine Corp and PayPal, to smaller organizations and around 20 social media agencies. While the volume of content does not
yet provide the basis for a definitive sector survey, the insights from users are revealing and point to some broad directional
conclusions. As our review base continues to grow, our reports will provide increasingly fine-tuned guidance through the
aggregation of additional end-user perspectives.
Cited quotes are hyperlinked so that you can click to read them in the context of the member’s full review. The names or
identities (where anonymized) of the reviewers are also hyperlinked so that you can visit their profiles on TrustRadius. Lastly,
products cited are hyperlinked to their directory listing in TrustRadius.
Seven Use Cases for SMMS
To date, much of the coverage in this sector has grouped
products that do very different things into the one comparison
and additionally covered a small subset of the landscape. By
Customer Care
contrast, this report breaks the landscape into the seven primary
Analyticsuse cases SMMS buyers are trying to address and encompasses
Listening
a broad range of products.
Publishing/Engagement
For each use case we highlight several software products in use,
Curation
and also share high-level commentary about how well those
products perform. While, a few SMMS products span several use
cases, in general, we continue to see best of breed solutions in Social Selling
use for specific purposes like Customer Care and Analytics, and Promotions
new solutions continue to emerge.
BUYER TIP: If you have diverse enterprise needs, you
probably need to evaluate best of breed solutions for
specifc purposes in addition to suite offerings that may
do a number of things well.
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©TrustRadius Inc. 2013Social Media Management in Large Enterprises
Advanced listening tools are by definition enterprise-level products with the capability of processing very large amounts of data
to sift for brand mentions and sentiment. But enterprise requirements go beyond advanced listening and a number of enterprise
platforms have emerged that encompass multiple use cases from listening to engagement and publishing, marketing campaigns
and analytics. Large enterprises tend to have specific requirements that are not always relevant to smaller organizations. Many
of the enterprise-level platforms have been building functionality specifically to meet these requirements. Among the more
important enterprise-level features are:
» Scalability
» Governance
» Permissioning / Team Collaboration
» Shared asset libraries
» Access security
General Factors of Concern to SMMS Users
Clearly the most important factor for any evaluation is how well the product supports your use case. However, once that
condition is satisfied, what other criteria should you consider? The SMMS users who have contributed reviews on TrustRadius
expressed that the following factors were important to them:
» Mobility – a desire to access SMMS products via mobile devices.
» Integration – capabilities to tie to other systems including CRM and analytics.
» Usability – SMMS users place a high emphasis on usability/ user interface.
» Likelihood and impact of acquisition - while acquisitions can bring integration benefts, they can also alter product
direction.
BUYER TIP: Before you begin your evaluation, determine which, if any, of these criteria are important to you.
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©TrustRadius Inc. 2013Seven Use Cases of SMMS
Marketing Functions
Listening & Sentiment Analysis
In the pre-social age, companies wanting to know what their customers thought about their products and services would have to
ask them, and try to draw conclusions based on equivocal answers. Today, they simply listen to what they are saying unprompted.
Monitoring the flood of public commentary about products or services has long been a primary use case for SMMS. At the most
basic level, social listening incorporates scanning for potential
At the most basic level, social listening incorporates
PR crises, identifying industry trends, gathering intelligence
scanning for potential PR crises, identifying
on competitors and identifying sales opportunities. But the sheer
industry trends, gathering intelligence on volume of data can be daunting. It’s sometimes difficult to sort the
wheat from the chaff, even for leading products in the space. competitors and identifying sales opportunities.
For example, Radian6 (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud) “had a lot of ‘noise’ despite filters,” wrote Deirdre Walsh, senior social
media manager at Jive Software, who used the product for three years in her previous role as social media manager at the engineering
technology firm National Instruments. Specifically, she added, “It had lots of spam included in the search results. I would have expected
it to filter this out.” Note that this perspective is now over a year old, and Radian6 has reportedly made improvements in this area.
As the listening function has become a basic part of a more complex set of features for enterprise products, some users are
still finding themselves forced to choose tools based on the channel they consider most important to monitor. For example,
a marketing manager at a PR and Communications agency uses Radian6 to monitor client brands because it is “relatively
inexpensive and provides great Twitter metrics.” And a social media strategist at a marketing firm with more than 500 employees
chose Sysomos MAP over Oracle’s Collective Intellect, Radian6 and the less-expensive Meltwater Buzz “because it produces
much more demographic and Twitter-specific data,” but was frustrated that “less information is available for Facebook (partly du