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Vendor Landscape Plus: Social Media Management Platforms

Reign in social media by choosing a management platform that's right for you.

Last Revised: May 31, 2013

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Your Challenge

  • The proliferation of social media initiatives across organizations has made actively managing social initiatives a challenging task. IT is receiving social media software requests from many parts of the enterprise.
  • The social media management platform (SMMP) market is a combination of vendors that enable social media monitoring, analytics, engagement, and social campaign management. Many vendors specialize in only a few of these areas, but not all. Sometimes multiple products are necessary.
  • Regulatory-related industries must archive some types of social interactions, just like email and IM. Compliance features vary widely across the SMMP market.

Our Advice

Critical Insight
  • Social media initiatives are no longer the sole responsibility of Marketing or PR. Social Media has become critical for Customer Service and HR recruiting as well. SMMPs must be evaluated for their ability to support an enterprise-wide social media strategy.
  • Selecting an SMMP involves defining the organization’s functional requirements, creating a shortlist based on these requirements, formally evaluating vendor offerings, and choosing the platform that is best tailored to the organization’s unique circumstances.
Impact and Result
  • Understand the features and business benefits of using an SMMP to effectively manage social media initiatives.
  • Determine functional requirements based on organizational needs to focus product evaluation on the right things.
  • Understand the current state of the SMMP market to evaluate and select an SMMP vendor that best meets the organization’s requirements.
  • Implement according to organizational roles for the best fit to existing PR, HR, Marketing, and Customer Service processes.

Get to Action

  1. Narrow down a list of SMMP vendors

    Create a manageable list of vendor candidates from among a field of over 50 vendors.

  2. Compare leading vendors and develop a shortlist

    Narrow the leading vendors down to the most appropriate few.

  3. Contrast and evaluate a shortlist of vendors

    Select the right SMMP vendor.

Related Solution Sets

Leverage Social Media for Enhanced Customer Interaction

From Marketing to Customer Service, get social or die!

Tags

Facebook, social media, Twitter, Socialware, SMMP, Radian6, Sprout Social, TNS Cymfony, Syncapse, Visible Technologies, Lithium SMM, social media management, social listening, hootsuite, socialvolt, sysomos, sas social media analytics, tweetdeck, conversocial, viralheat, adobe social, salesforce marketing cloud

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Reign in social media by choosing a management platform that's right for you.

Solution Road Map

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View the full Solution Road Map