2013 Buyers Guide for Social Media Management Software [UPDATED - SEE BELOW]

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©TrustRadius Inc. 2013
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Direct from the Perspectives of End-Users
The Buyers Guide
for Social Media
Management Software
First Published October 21, 2013
By Alan Cooke, Research Director,TrustRadius
Curated from End-User Reviews on:
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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.
» 45% leverage it to identify internal talent.”1
Stanford Business said last year that the world has changed and that “consumers, employees and stakeholders expect to engage
with companies and their brands through social media”.2
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.
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.
Your Guide To Reading This Report
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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Why 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
contrast, this report breaks the landscape into the seven primary
use cases SMMS buyers are trying to address and encompasses
a broad range of products.
For each use case we highlight several software products in use,
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
use for specific purposes like Customer Care and Analytics, and
new solutions continue to emerge.
BUYER TIP: If you have diverse enterprise needs, you
probably need to evaluate best of breed solutions for
Listening
Social Selling
Analytics
Promotions
Curation
Customer Care
Publishing/Engagement

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Social 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.
»
direction.
BUYER TIP:

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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
PR crises, identifying industry trends, gathering intelligence
on competitors and identifying sales opportunities.But the sheer
volume of data can be daunting.It’s sometimes difficult to sort the
wheat from the chaff, even for leading products in the space.
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 due
to Facebook’s restrictions).” Carolyn Smith at FleishmanHillard switched from Radian6 to Meltwater Buzz but, although she is
getting better customer service, she feels that the product is lacking in functionality. For example: “Radian6 allows you to pick up
mentions in mainstream news and compare it to what you see in social media while Meltwater Buzz only looks at social media”.
It’s also “difficult to create a share of voce for more than two brands…at a time” and “it’s harder to filter out certain hits and find
exactly what you’re looking for”.
Full-featured products like MutualMind, Radian6, and SDL SM2 include sentiment analysis, which attempts to provide automatic
categorization of comments into positive or negative buckets. However, high levels of accuracy are extremely difficult to achieve
through this kind of automation.
“The nature of human conversation makes it difficult for a machine to categorize sentiment with 100% accuracy,” writes Brad
Lawless, vice president for strategy at the social media company Collective Bias, in a review of Mutual Mind, a listening platform
Seven Use Cases of SMMS
At the most basic level,social listening incorporates
scanning for potential PR crises, identifying
industry trends, gathering intelligence on
competitors and identifying sales opportunities.

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with built-in analytics and other functions.“MutualMind gets sentiment right between 50% to 70%, which is within acceptable
industry averages for this type of product. With additional tuning (which MutualMind provides) the accuracy levels will increase.”
The ability to manually tune the sentiment data by correcting errors is consequently very important. In a review of Sysomos
MAP, which is an analysis-oriented product designed for in-depth research on social media chatter, Tyler Sweeney, social media
coordinator at RPA, a marketing firm with more than 500 employees, recommends using the vendor’s more basic product,
Sysomos Heartbeat, for sentiment analysis: “In Heartbeat you can see what people are saying specifically. You can also alter
sentiment (e.g. from negative to neutral). In MAP you cannot manipulate the data in this way.” Hagan Ramsey, social engagement
manager at a marketing and advertising agency makes a similar point in his review of Crimson Hexagon ForSight: “Sentiment
returns are not accurate unless trained... the sentiment for the “basic buzz monitor” is usually off because the product does not
always understand a comment’s context or sarcasm”.
Listening Tools
SOFTWARE AVERAGE RATING
Adobe Social
Beevolve
Brandwatch
Crimson Hexagon*
Expion
HootSuite Enterprise
HootSuite Pro
HootSuite Free*
Jive Fathom*
ListenLogic
Meltwater Buzz
MutualMind*
Radian6 (Salesforce Marketing Cloud)
SDL SM2
Shoutlet
Spredfast
Sprout Social
Simplify 360
Sprinklr
Synthesio
Sysomos Heartbeat
Sysomos Map
UberVu
Viralheat*
*Rating based on one review

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Publishing / Engagement
A second common marketing use case is scheduling posts for publication to social media channels in advance, and at the
right time, to boost engagement. Publishing functionality makes it easy to draft and publish posts to multiple social channels
according to a pre-defined schedule. This is particularly important where multiple marketers are promoting different products
or services across many different channels. The ability to plan a shared publishing calendar and schedule posts so that there
is an appropriate time lag between each one and to make sure that messages are congruent with each other is often crucial.
Many tools like Spredfast and Sprinklr also allow for centralized content libraries where users can pull pre-approved content for
specific campaigns.
Publishing functionality has become relatively common. Most tools now include it to some degree. Some marketers find basic
functionality sufficient: “We were looking for an easy and affordable way to schedule and publish social media posts, get
guidance on when to post, engage with our most engaged and
most influential followers, and analyze the reach of our posts.
Crowdbooster checks all of these boxes,” said Jono Smith, VP of
marketing at Event 360, an event management consulting firm
serving the nonprofit sector.
Deirdre Walsh, senior social media manager at Jive Software, wrote that Spredfast allowed a single social media manager
“to be efficient with her time. Instead of spending all day hopping around from one social platform to another (i.e. Twitter to
Facebook), she was able to proactively schedule content and see conversations across the social web. This efficiency gain meant
she could take full advantage of other insights Spredfast offered - like what time it was best to schedule content, what type of
content performs the best, which channel is growing the fastest etc. As the team grew and the social conversations became more
sophisticated, Spredfast was great for allowing the team to scale.”
Although many publishing tools are designed for brand marketing, B2B specialized tools like Oktopost are starting to emerge.
Integration with marketing automation tools becomes important here, and publishing to LinkedIn is much more of a focus.
As Nili Molvin, CMO at marketing agency Penguin Strategies says: “We started using Oktopost because of the great LinkedIn
capabilities that it has. Oktopost enables us to post into multiple groups and analyze the effectiveness of each group and post”.
But strong publishing capabilities alone are often not enough. The increasing demand for team functionality and integration
– themes that are recurring across the original use cases for SMMS – have caused some frustration with basic publishing tools.
Smith added that Crowdbooster “doesn’t seem like an ideal tool for enterprise social media management. It does not have
enterprise-level features like CRM & web analytics integration, and role-based permissions.”
Similarly, consultant James Young of Left Field Social, reviewing Gremln, stated that “While the publishing is easy, better than
HootSuite for example, but less intuitive than other platforms like Spredfast, the listening and measuring aspects are weak.
Setting up search streams is fairly well hidden from users, and the process to add streams is not very intuitive.”
BUYER TIP:
But strong publishing capabilities alone are often
not enough. The increasing demand for team
functionality and integration ... have caused some
frustration with basic publishing tools.

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Publishing Tools
Adobe Social
Argyle Social*
Buddy Media (SF Marketing Cloud)*
Expion
Gremln*
HootSuite Pro
HootSuite Free*
Oktopost*
Oracle Vitrue
Shoutlet
Spredfast
Sprinklr
Sprout Social
TweetDeck
ViralHeat*
WebTrends Social*

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Promotions
Related to publishing, using social media to support marketing campaigns via promotional activities like contests and sweepstakes
has emerged as a distinct use case.Beyond posting content,marketers encourage their customers to respond and interact.This creates
additional content (often in support of marketing messages in other channels), while also opening avenues for engagement.
Several tools have been specifically designed for the creation of customized social content for polls or sweepstakes – typically on
Facebook. However, extending this kind of functionality to other social channels has also become more important recently.
Melissa Porter, eCommerce administrator at Motionwear, uses Webtrends Social for marketing promotions because the product
“allows me to develop a strong following on Facebook by use of sharing and build a strong email database for future marketing
campaigns…it allows me to build brand hype.
This specific use case is seeing a lot of product innovation and some of the incumbents are starting to fall victim to more nimble
competitors. A community manager at a large telecommunications company with 201-500 employees used Wildfire for social
promotions and says,“Wildfire is excellent at creating a self service promotion in social. From concept to final product can be
achieved in under 20 minutes.” However, he also feels that the product has become a long in the tooth and that “newcomers to
Rafflecopter, WooBox are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price.”
Similarly, David Pierpont, Director of Social Media at Ansira feels that “the [Salesforce] purchase of Buddy and Radian has nearly
halted evolution of both products for the last year, both are falling behind quickly.”
On the other hand, according to the aforementioned community manager who ultimately switched from Wildfire,“Punchtab
offered powerful custom features, and allows us to run a variety of campaigns across multiple platforms.” Woobox also has its
fans: Amos Orr, Content Manager at Southwest Lousiana CVB, comments that he chose Woobox over competitors due to it’s
“affordability for the size of our fan base, platform integration (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and Vine), ease of
use and customizability, mobile friendliness, and types of promotions (Sweepstakes, Coupons, Pin to Win, Photo/Video Contest,
Instant Wins, and Polls).
BUYER TIP:
Promotions Tools
Buddy Media (SF Marketing Cloud)*
Engage Sciences
HootSuite Pro
Oracle Vitrue
Punchtab*
Strutta
Webtrends Social*
WooBox

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Curation
Using social media to establish thought leadership without the burden of content production, social curation has emerged as an
important new distinct marketing use case since our original report on the SMMS landscape. Aside from the cost savings derived
from repurposing external content, curation promises marketers the opportunity to burnish their brands without coming across
as excessively boastful or single-minded.
Arguably a subcategory of publishing, some publishing platform vendors have developed curation capability as a platform
component. For example Hootsuite has developed a browser plug-in that allows users to share web pages to social networks.
But several vendors like Buffer have produced curation-specific tools. Ian Greenleigh, manager of Content and Social Strategy at
the social commerce software company Bazaarvoice, wrote that Buffer “makes it really easy to schedule curated content updates
on the fly. Click the applet, and it will add it to your social update pipeline based on timing you determine beforehand. Great for
helping companies provide valuable third-party content to their networks with optimized timing.”
Enterprise curation platforms like Mass Relevance and Livefyre allow large streams of social content to be filtered and displayed
on any digital surface including television graphics and jumbotrons. According to a Livefyre survey, Twitter is the dominant
channel for real-time social content, with 93% of survey respondents curating social activity for that channel compared to 82%
for Facebook.
Curation Tools
Buffer*
EngageSciences
HootSuite Pro
HootSuite Free*
Keepstream
Livefyre
Mass Relevance
Scoop.it
Storify
ViralHeat*

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Analytics
Virtually all SMMS vendors provide pre-packaged social data reports to count fans, likes, re-tweets and comments. But these metrics
are often less important than measuring reach.This means understanding which content is shared and how often. One option is to
simply provide APIs so that the user can leverage 3rd-party analytics packages, but basic integrated reporting is a must.
Several reviewers reported using one platform for content creation/scheduling,and relying on a separate listening platform for
advanced analytics. Even after combining tools, though, unstructured social metrics can easily turn into another data silo. While
social media data is useful in providing insight into consumer opinion, it is less helpful at predicting when a potential customer
is ready to buy. Social data needs to be collected and analyzed in conjunction with data from other channels like web and email to
provide the whole picture.
Beyond data integration issues,some users have found the analytics
Tara DeMarco, a social strategist at Bazaarvoice, a social
commerce software company with more than 500 employees, wrote that Sprout Social does a great job of tracking a variety
of metrics that the company cares about like audience size, amplification rate (number of re-tweets) and number of likes and
shares, but has:
“No real presentation layer. All the data has to be manually exported to Excel to produce a report. It would be nice to have some
kind of automated report builder capability.”
Another marketing agency with 51-200 employees is very happy with HootSuite Enterprise for listening and engagement, and
“We use Radian6 for analytics as the analytics functionality in Radian6 is much deeper, and it can search across a wider range of
channels, including blogs. In addition, we also use another product called Simply Measured to perform an even deeper level of
social analytics. Simply Measured has a powerful reporting engine that allows us to build custom reports to drill into any metric
we wish. The reporting capabilities in HootSuite are much more pre-packaged”.
Sysomos and Radian6 are designed to monitor a huge volume of social media conversations
for specific brand mentions, reduce the data to a manageable level by filtering out noise, and then deliver actionable reports.
Since this is a highly data-intensive activity, the analytics capabilities of these products can be an order of magnitude stronger
than the much more basic tools offered by platforms which are designed more for publishing: For example, Hagan Ramsey, a
digital strategist at the marketing firm IQ, chose Sysomos MAP because “the engine is slightly faster and yields better looking
reports. Also, Sysomos has superior text analytics.” Similarly, a social media strategist at a small marketing agency is particularly
impressed by the sheer number of sources Radian6 covers: “We evaluate up to five listening tools every year and each has their
pros and cons. Radian6 satisfied our needs in reporting, insights and the representation of the data. We also liked the amount of
One marketing consultant for a PR firm with fewer than ten employees said that Sysomos MAP “also generated decent visuals.
We did not have to export the data to Excel to get acceptable looking charts and graphs. The system generated graphs that we
could re-use directly with clients.”
Even as these functions become increasingly integrated into packaged systems, specialty tools continue to emerge. SocialBro,
for example, drills down into Twitter followings to track location, activity and demographics. Consultant James Young adopted
Several reviewers reported using one platform
for content creation/scheduling, and relying on a
separate listening platform for advanced analytics.

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the tool because “In essence, I can see when tweets are gaining or losing followers for my account. SocialBro also has great
analytical tools like best time to tweet reports. SocialBro also provide a very complete look at each person you follow or is
following you. It helps to understand who the people are.” Simply Measured, another specialized analytics tool, also gets a good
review from Shubanker Goel at Kaplan Thaler who points out that “Simply Measured “provides a complete social media snapshot
report that encompasses key insights from…Facebook, Twitter and many other platforms” and is a “very exhaustive tool with
capability to provide in-depth data as well as high-level actionable insights”.
BUYER TIP:
Specialized Analytics Tools
Attensity
Crowdbooster
PageLever*
SimplyMeasured
Socialbakers*
SocialBro
Social Mention

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Customer Care
Customer care in social has quickly grown in importance. Initially, consumers forced the issue, discovering that the quickest route
to a customer service response was not to call the company and open a support ticket, but rather to tweet the issue and have
an agent respond to the tweet in almost real time. Part of the reason for highly responsive customer service over Twitter, is that
complaints are posted in a public forum, and companies will bend over backwards to prevent having their dirty laundry aired in
a public arena. We probably all remember “United Breaks Guitars” which is the exemplar of this phenomenon. Undoubtedly, the
real purpose of complaint tweets is just to vent frustration, not necessarily to elicit a response. But research from Nielsen and
McKinsey indicates that almost half of all social media users have turned to social channels to resolve customer service issues,
and about 30% of social media users prefer contacting customer
service through a social channel rather than by phone.
Some huge brands like Nike, Blackberry,American, Samsung, and
Dell use social media (mostly Twitter) as a primary support
channel, for good reason. An American Express report revealed
that customers electing to use social media for service are typically the most engaged and vocal customers, and are prepared to
spend substantially more (21%) with companies they believe provide great service. Ryanair’s recent decision to stop providing
customer care to its customers over Facebook and Twitter is a glaring counter-example. The rationale is clearly to keep costs at
the lowest possible level in a cutthroat industry. However, in an open letter to the Ryanair CEO, the founder of Brand Embassy, a
social customer care platform, pointed out that ignoring customers, leads directly to customer losses, and that losing customer
trust is irreversible.
But once rapid intervention expectations are established, they can be difficult to sustain without appropriate tools. Many vendors
are now talking up this use case for their products.
Community platforms like GetSatisfaction and Jive moved into this area quickly. GetSatisfaction allowed companies to add
a special “customer support” tab to their Facebook fan pages so that customer support issues are automatically routed to the
customer support team for resolution. Similarly, Jive recently introduced an entire “Social Customer Service Solution.” Zendesk too
provides functionality that allows customer service tweets to be automatically turned into Zendesk support tickets. In May 2012,
they partnered with Sprout Social to offer more social capabilities from within the platform.
As companies started to realize that being highly proactive with unhappy customers can yield great results, SMMS vendors
highly specialized in this domain started to gain traction last year. For example, David Tull, customer engagement manager at
the retailer JackThreads, said that Conversocial “allows us to proactively provide service to customers who have not yet directly
reached out to our department, which increases our likelihood of recovering those customers.” Andrey Grigoryev, a social media
manager at Hertz indicates that having tried to use a number of general purpose and free tools in combination, they realized
that this kind of approach “did not provide the functionality and analytics required to deploy the customer care team on social.
We needed a robust solution to manage agent activity, track individual performance and activity, and support our custom
communication workflows.” Herz ultimately selected Conversocial as the solution that best met their requirements. Conversocial
was selected for several reasons, including the intuitive user interface (very important for CS agents who are already working in
a multitude of complex systems), capacity to support our custom workflows and assignment processes, and the robust analytic
dashboard capable of reporting on metrics specific to customer care.”
Some huge brands like Nike, Blackberry,
American, Samsung, and Dell use social media
(mostly Twitter) as a primary support channel,
for good reason.

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Social Dynamx, specifically designed for customer care in high-volume contact centers, was acquired by Lithium in October and
has been re-branded Lithium Social Web: Another example of the obvious synergy between online customer community software
and social customer care. One early Social Dynamx customer, Baochi Nguyen, former director of marketing at the telecom firm
RingCentral, put the value proposition succinctly when she said: The product “allows me to monitor a support case all the way
from original tweet, through various hand-offs in customer support all the way to resolution.”
Another user, a customer service leader at a software company with more than 1,000 employees, said: “The Artificial Intelligence
built into Social Dynamx filters tweets, Facebook posts etc, down to a manageable number of the most important to address. This
Marketing and customer care departments have different needs, and best-of-breed products like Conversocial and Lithium Social
Web have highly specific functionality unique to the customer care use case. For example, Conversocial has a natural language
processing engine that helps companies filter through the noise and respond faster to customer service issues. It looks at
the syntax and structure of sentences to identify issues, and over time learns the type of issues that each individual customer
or priority to allow high ticket volumes to be processed quickly and efficiently. Analytics too tend to be use-case specific allowing
for things like tracking of SLAs and agent productivity, time of day volume analysis, and issue categorization.
However, some users are working with general SMMS tools for this purpose. Customer care is a frequent use case for Hootsuite
Enterprise customers. For example, a community manager at a communications technology company with more than 200
employees uses Hootsuite Enterprise to respond to customer tweets relating to customer support issues in almost real
time: “When someone has a problem, we have a very limited window to fix it. Speed is hugely important to us. We aim to fix
problems in 10 minutes. Performance is fantastic. Mentions are pushed very quickly to appropriate stream and we can respond
immediately.”
But the demand for enterprise-level functions and integration are quickly coming to even this relatively newer use case. Richard
Margetic, director of global social media at Dell, likes Sprinklr as a customer service tool because of its strength in “roles and
permissions, scheduling, analytics, calendars, reports, customer service, training,” with the caveat that “their permissions are on
the person and not on the platform.”
Specialized Customer Care Tools
Attensity Respond
Brand Embassy
Conversocial
Lithium Social Web
LiveOps Social

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General Purpose Tools used for Customer Care
Radian6 (Salesforce Marketing Cloud)
Spredfast
Sprinklr
Sprout Social
Viralheat*
Social Sales
Sales Intelligence
Some companies are using social media to seek new efficiencies for their sales forces. Products like InsideView, competing
with more traditional business information vendors like Hoover’s and Dun & Bradstreet, seek to take the chill off cold calls by
providing intelligence derived partly from the social media activity of target companies. Users find the capability valuable, but
some say the tools still need to be refined.
“I can flag individual companies or job titles or other keywords, and the system automatically tracks these and sends me a
daily email feed with updates,” wrote Heather Hoetger, vice president of business development at the marketing firm Bulldog
Solutions, in a review of InsideView. But, she added,“The contact information for people working at specific companies is not
reliable. I have to double-check each contact against LinkedIn and it often turns out that the job title is wrong, or the person has
moved on. This is a major inconvenience.”
A twist on the sales intelligence value proposition is provided by relative newcomer Leadspace, which combs through the social
web and your contact database comparing people’s online presence to a vendor’s unique ideal buyer profiles.
Sales Intelligence Tools
InsideView*
Leadspace
ViralHeat*

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Social Selling / Compliance
Vendors like Hearsay Social
local markets. Aside from the retail, real estate and hospitality industries, the tools appeal to heavily regulated sectors such as
banking and financial services. Socialware is another player in this area that focuses heavily on the compliance value proposition
and sells primarily to heavily regulated industries like banks and insurance companies, and brokerages. They work closely with
financial regulators like FINRA to ensure their product meets current compliance guidelines.
Additional providers in the social compliance space include Arkovi which focuses on archiving of social data and SocialVolt
which is a social media risk management platform.
Other tools are designed to facilitate sales contact over multiple different channels. For example, Nimble offers a “social CRM”
system aimed at small and medium-sized business. The idea is to cull data from the social web and combine it with CRM data so
that users can contact customers without having to scour all of their social media outlets.
Vendors from adjacent spaces like marketing automation are also beginning to talk about “social selling” as an extension of
their platform capabilities. For example, Oracle’s Eloqua has promoted the importance of the social channel for building sales
relationships. And companies like SocialPandas, which received funding from True Ventures but has not launched its product yet,
There will likely be more activity to come in this category as social expands beyond the marketing badlands into other critical
parts of the organization.
Social Selling Tools
Arkovi
Hearsay Social
HootSuite Pro
Nimble
Social Volt
Socialware

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Vendors by Use Case Summary
Listening
Social Selling
Analytics
Promotions
Curation
Customer Care
Publishing/Engagement

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Although this report discusses a broad array of products, a few are specifically designed for large enterprises. The following
represents facets of solutions that are oriented around large enterprise needs.
Complex Listening
While many publishing/ engagement tools contain some element of listening, most are not designed for more complex listening
needs like brand or sentiment analysis. Purpose built listening tools can scan across millions of sources including social
networking sites, blogs, discussion forums, and other social media channels for things like brand mentions and then process
enormous quantities of unstructured data.
A strategist at a marketing and advertising agency with between 51 and 200 employees highlights this as one of advantages
of Radian6: “One of the things I love about the tool is the ability to crawl so many sources including social media sites, blogs,
mainstream news, forums, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and more…the tool covers over 650 million sources. ”
Enterprise listening tools are capable of translating this huge quantity of unstructured data into numerical data, which can then
be linked to structured data in a database and analyzed with more traditional data mining tools. This is, almost by definition, an
enterprise-level activity related to Business Intelligence. Tools like Radian6, Sysomos MAP, MutualMind, and Visible Intelligence
are all examples of true enterprise listening tools.
The Emergence of Enterprise Suites
Large company requirements frequently extend beyond a single use case like listening. The SMMS market remains quite
fragmented with a proliferation of different tools designed for specific use cases, but the risk of data silos has also triggered the
emergence of a trend towards integrated platforms covering multiple use cases and allowing social activities to be coordinated
across the enterprise. Although these suite tools often cover multiple use cases, they can have less depth than best-of breed tools
for specific use cases. For example, tools that focus on customer engagement by necessity have to have some level of listening
built in, though it may not have to be as deep as to support brand sentiment analysis. Increasingly, customers want to be able to
monitor brand mentions, publish posts and engage social followers, and finally gather analytics data all from a single platform.
For large enterprises wishing to coordinate social media management across the organization, a number of specific capabilities
are required. These capabilities are somewhat intertwined, but the main components are:
» Ability to govern large numbers of social accounts: The number of social channels managed is one criterion.
The ability to manage very large numbers of social accounts across departments and geographies is also crucial.
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important to be able to audit properties and track who has access to which accounts. Just as important from a
» Multi-lingual support: Global enterprises often need to manage foreign language social channels including
ones using multi-byte characters like the Chinese sites Weibo and RenRen. For such channels, in-line translation
capabilities are important.
» Team Collaboration: Support for multiple teams with hierarchical permission structures allowing different users
varying degrees of access. Team collaboration around engagement can be particularly complex in very large
organizations. Communication pathways between teams, based on product and/or geography tend to multiply
» Asset libraries: Shared, multi-lingual content libraries for content publishing that can be accessed across the
organization.
» Sophisticated analytics: Reporting across multiple channels, but also across multiple brands and organizational
functions. The ability to report across use cases is also important.
Marketed mainly to larger enterprises, Sprinklr has taken advantage of the growing demand for enterprise suites. For example, a
manager of a very large public utility chose Sprinklr because “it scales very well. You can have a number of users with customer
permission levels [and] the digital asset library is a huge value-add component.”
Dennis Smith, Social Media Strategist at Dell is also impressed with the workflow features: “Sprinklr makes it easy to manage
multiple different Twitter accounts and Facebook pages all at the same time with a centralized view. There is also team
functionality / workflow which makes it quite easy to assign actions to other team members, and route requests based on
automated rules etc.”
Spredfast too is focused on this segment of the market. Deirdre Walsh, senior social media manager at Jive software,
chose Spredfast because it was “great for allowing the team to scale. We can setup approval teams, customized workflows,
permissioning, etc. Additionally, it allows us to build an enterprise repository so we can share social media assets. A Marketing
Manager at a major supermarket chain was equally impressed with the flexibility: “Spredfast supports out complex and
asymmetrical social media deployment effortlessly. We can configure user permissions, workflow, and analytics in whatever ways
are necessary to support the many accounts and users we have in play at any time. We can modify our approach as our business
needs change.”
Even mid-sized organizations benefit from enterprise capabilities. Hootsuite Enterprise is particularly strong in the areas of team
functionality and collaboration, and a marketing manager at an advertising agency with 51-200 employees placed particularly
high value on this functionality, calling it a primary criterion for platform selection: “We have a huge social media team and one
of the best features is the Teams functionality that enables us to configure the product to reflect the way we are structured. We
can build separate organizations with different team. Each team member is in turn mapped to a social media profile, or account
(several people can then contribute to a single profile discussion). This functionality enables us to build a highly collaborative
platform where we can have multi-threaded conversations. This allows for much deeper conversations that are possible in the
single response model of other tools.”

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Similarly, after starting with Tweetdeck and the free version of HootSuite, Joe Recomendes, director of online marketing at
Command Partners, an Internet marketing agency with a social media marketing practice, upgraded to HootSuite’s enterprise
tools to best serve “team members and multiple accounts. Some of the other popular social media dashboards do not offer an
organizational system where you can offer different roles and responsibilities to different people within the company. HootSuite
allows me to delegate tasks and monitor independent employee performance on the networks.”
But the amount of control companies require varies widely. In a TrustRadius discussion on workflow rules, the role of corporate
culture emerged as a significant criterion in setting workflow rules. By extension, this factor tended to drive product selection.
For example, one social media strategist at an advertising firm with more than 500 employees described a seven-step process
that starts with brainstorming. The firm reviews proposed topics, obtains client approval and then assigns a special team to write
posts. After another internal review and client approval, the firm schedules posts using a publishing platform. Finally, managers
review the whole operation through monthly analytic reports.
In contrast, one marketing employee at a telecom company with 200-500 employees using HootSuite said that after agents
receive training (internally and from HootSuite),“there are no editor safeguards or moderation in place here, and agents are
trusted and empowered to respond as they feel necessary.”
The company with no safeguards was small (200-500 employees). The ad firm with a meticulous process was bigger (500-1,000
employees). But culture is about more than size. Consider the protocol in place at Dell: “We empower our employees to engage
directly in social media without a review process,” says Rishi Dave, executive director of Digital Marketing at Dell.“We require
them to go through training and become social media ‘certified’ before they can engage on Dell’s behalf. Once they do this, they
are empowered to engage directly with customers in authentic, real-time conversation.

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Mobile Access
Several reviewers made mobile access a top selection criterion. While many vendors have started offering apps for the iPhone,
iPad and Android devices, some are focusing their resources elsewhere. Twitter subsidiary TweetDeck, for example, shut down its
mobile apps in May, announcing plans to concentrate on the web.
“Lack of mobile apps was a huge deal breaker for us and really enabled us to rule out most products,” wrote a community
marketing manager at telecom firm with 201-500 employees.“In our roles, it’s vitally important that we have access from
anywhere. Only HootSuite and TweetDeck had mobile applications. We use [HootSuite] for listening / customer support and
sharing data with our clients.”
A manager at a utility company with more than 10,000 employees chose Sprinklr for workflow processes and scalability, giving close
scrutiny to the mobile performance: “The approval process for reviewing messages prior to posting on social channels is clean and
simple, and very easy to do from the mobile app,” but “The Android app is a little buggy and the lack of an iPad app is disappointing.”
Integration
For a variety of users, the ability to integrate SMMS platforms with other software products has become important. For example,
companies using social media customer support solutions wanted to be able to hook their SMMS into the main support ticketing
system or their CRM.
There is also a desire to integrate SMMS tools with analytics platforms. Users report success with Spredfast for an even more
common use case, integrating web analytics tools like Google Analytics and Adobe Site Catalyst (formerly Omniture) for a
complete analytics snapshot.
Additionally, integration with community platforms has become increasingly valued, giving an advantage to companies like
Jive that are strong in the community platform space and also offer social tools. In fact, communities and “sense and respond”
activities on the social web can be considered as the two halves of social support.
One Jive Fathom user, a marketing manager at an electrical manufacturing company with more than 5,000 employees,
commented:
“[We have] seamless integration with our internal community. We can easily create new discussions around actionable mentions,
bringing in experts, stakeholders when needed.”
General Factors of Concern to SMMS Users

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Similarly, the acquisition of SocialDynamx by Lithium achieves the same goal. Lithium community users can now expect seamless
integration between these two complementary systems.
Ease of Use
Across nearly the entire range of use cases, ease of use has become a crucial factor in product selection. For the most part, this
trend results from the spread of uses and users company-wide. The usability expectations for this category of products is very
high indeed; products are judged as though they were consumer products, rather than traditional business software applications.
For example, a marketing employee at a telecom company with 201-500 employees chose Punchtab to build buzz with
sweepstakes partly due to “Ease of use - we can create a new campaign in under ten minutes.”
One social media strategist at a software firm with fewer than 200 employees chose Sprinklr over Radian6 and Desk.com to
support global customer service teams partly because the firm was “looking for better ease of use, more channel coverage, better
customization and applicability to social support functions
and more responsive customer support staff.” But even after
prioritizing that criteria in selection, the reviewer still noted
that Sprinklr’s “UI can be confusing or awkward at times.”
Keith Bailly, regional director of marketing at the recruitment
firm Phoenix Staff, chose Hootsuite Pro because of the user
experience, and because he was able to implement the product in-house and praised it as “easy to set up.” A marketing manager
at an advertising agency with 51-200 employees loves the Hootsuite Enterprise UI: “The UI is extremely clean and [offers] great
user experience”. But judgments about UI can be very subjective. Social media consultant James Young, switching from Spredfast
to Hootsuite Pro for cost reasons, found that “across the board, usability is poor. I find it extremely difficult to navigate and
perform common functions. Reporting is labor intensive, requiring me to build nearly everything by hand. Listening is difficult
because streams UI is confusing and disjointed. Influencer identification is a hidden function that I had to search the internet for
help to find. Hootsuite actually does everything I need; it just makes it very difficult to do these things. For example, publishing
to multiple platforms requires me to manipulate two separate elements that are not obviously related to each other.”
Scaling Sprinklr across a utility company with more than 10,000 employees, a manager complained (in an otherwise largely
favorable review) that “the old UI still exists in certain areas, though the new UI is much nicer & faster. The learning curve can be
a little steep because of the many features so it does take some perseverance to really master all the capabilities (reminds me of
learning guitar, it take practice, practice, practice).”
Acquisition Risk/Impact
The last few years have seen multiple acquisitions of SMMS vendors by big software companies. These acquisitions reflect the
demand for social functionality within large enterprises and commensurately the desire among the large enterprise software
providers to have competitive social offerings. In many cases, the acquisitions have shifted the focus for the acquired companies
from new feature innovation to integration with the acquirer’s other products. Social media data is inherently valuable, but is
much more valuable when integrated and correlated with data from other sources like CRM systems.
This trend has been a driver behind some notable acquisitions. For example: Oracle bought Vitrue, Involver and Collective
The usability expectations for this category of
products is very high indeed; products are judged
as though they were consumer products, rather than
traditional business software applications.

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Intellect, gaining tools for social media management, app development and monitoring. These tools are now part of the “Oracle
Social Relationship Management Suite” and they can now be accessed from a common interface via single sign-on. However, this
is a baby step towards real integration of the social components, not to speak of integration with data from other parts of the
Oracle product portfolio like Oracle CRM.
Salesforce has pursued a similar strategy acquiring Buddy Media’s Facebook marketing tools and the Radian6 listening platform
and combining them under the Marketing Cloud moniker. However, some users complain that the pace of integration is slow.
The addition of marketing automation to the Marketing Cloud following the recent acquisition of ExactTarget promises broader
marketing functionality, but it will bring even more complex integration issues.
Last year brought several other notable acquisitions. Google was beaten to the punch by Salesforce in its bid to acquire Buddy
Media. However the acquisition of Wildfire, a contest and promotions specialist, was a consolation prize giving the traditional
search giant a back-door entrance to the social media information flow. HootSuite acquired Seesmic, and Lithium combined
its customer community offering with SocialDynamx’ customer support tools. Marketo is the first of the marketing automation
vendors to add some social marketing luster to its platform through the acquisition of CrowdFactory.
Despite the market consolidation, no single vendor has yet become dominant, though leaders are emerging by use case.
BUYER TIP:

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Use Cases for Social Are Expanding
Use cases for SMMS tools are broadening and infiltrating other departments beyond Marketing. As we have seen, Customer
Care and Sales are two of the newer areas where there is increasing activity and interest. But marketing departments are also
benefiting from entirely new capabilities like social curation, which enable them to harness social content in the pursuit of
uniquely authentic marketing.
New “Best of Breed” Solutions Continue to Emerge
While some vendors are consumed with integration challenges, or with building out more complete suite functionality, there
is still a lot of innovation in specialized functions where emerging vendors are beginning to pose a threat to established
solutions. One example of this is in the analytics space where a vendor like SocialBro has quickly established a reputation for
very strong capabilities in the relatively narrow area of Twitter analytics. Similarly, PunchTab is challenging the incumbents in the
promotions space.
Specific Capabilities Required by Large Enterprises
Large enterprises have specific requirements and a number of vendors have focused on building out highly scalable platforms
designed to meet the needs of these larger organizations. In particular, enterprises need the ability scale across multiple entities
and to foster collaboration across the organization with hierarchical permission structures and libraries of shared content.
Governance issues have also become critical.
Acquisitions Have Focused On Desire to Integrate with Other Systems
The need for integration of social tools with other systems like support ticketing systems, CRM customer data, web analytics, and
community platforms is strong and is a big driver of the many acquisitions that have occurred in the space over the last couple
of years. However, not all of these acquisitions have gone well, perhaps due to an underestimation of the integration challenges.
The result is palpable frustration with some of the acquired products like Radian6 and Wildfire that used to be leaders in the
space but are now being challenged by new entrants.
What You Should Take-Away

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Usability Is a Key Factor
Usability is one of the primary capabilities upon which social tools are judged. There is an expectation that tools in this category
have elegant consumer-like UI’s and that they are a pleasure to use. There is very little patience for poorly designed user
interfaces. Almost all vendors have made considerable efforts to improve user interfaces as a way of gaining market share.
Mobile Access is Increasingly Important
Mobile access is becoming another very important selection criterion. The ability to access the publishing engine from mobile
devices is becoming a critical requirement and, again, vendors are struggling to meet this need.

2013 Buyers Guide for Social Media Management Software [UPDATED - SEE BELOW]

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2013 Buyers Guide for Social Media Management Software [UPDATED - SEE BELOW]