Social Media Management Platforms reduce complexity and increase the effectiveness of enterprise social media programs

In recent study Info-Tech Research Group published an introduction to choose a social media management platform that fits your business.

Info-Tech’s social media research covers all the bases of running a best-of-breed social media program. Starting the selection process based on the following:

photo credit: InfoTech

Social Media Management Platforms are solutions that offer a host of features for effectively monitoring the social cloud and managing your organization’s presence in the social cloud. Social Media Management Platforms give businesses the tools they need to run social campaigns in a timely and cost-effective manner.

Functionality broadly falls into three categories:

1. Account and campaign management
2. In-band response
3. Social monitoring/analytics

The unique value of Social Media Management Platforms comes from their ability to manage and track multiple social media services. Aggregating and managing data from multiple services gives businesses a much more holistic view of their organization’s social initiatives and reputation in the social cloud.

Cost/Benefit Scenario: A mid-sized consumer products company wins big by adopting an SMMP

Apart of Infotech’s study was a case scenario of a mid-size consumer products firm that brought in $36,000 in revenue after integrating a social media management platform. The year prior, social media was costing the organization $26,000 with no measurable return.

photo credit: InfoTech

Recommendations for How to choose a Social Media Management Platform

• Adopt an SMMP to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of enterprise social media initiatives (particularly if your organization operates in a predominantly B2C context).
• Develop a formal strategy for social media prior to deploying an SMMP.
• Establish business requirements, translate into functional requirements, and evaluate and select a vendor based on these needs.
• There are a number of vendors to choose from in the SMMP market space; your functional requirements will drive which vendor you select, as there is no clear winner for all organizational scenarios.
• After a vendor has been selected, establish points of integration with CRM solutions to enable a 360-degree view of the customer and your call centers.
• Create a model for ongoing platform maintenance, and select a deployment model (e.g. agency, centralized, or distributed), which makes sense given the size and vertical of your organization.
• Train end users in a role-based manner, and assign someone in the organization to serve as the resident expert on the SMMP.

SMMPs provide robust feature sets across both social listening (analytics) and engagement. They give marketing, sales, and customer service managers the tools they need to interact with prospects and customers, as well as mine different social media services for trends.

To learn more about selecting a social media management platform download the full report