TrustRadius recently published the Social Media Management Software (SMMS) Buyers’ Guide based upon in-depth user reviews of over 30 different products.

The guide primarily discussed the seven primary use cases for SMMS, but also highlighted the unique needs of large enterprises. A few key themes emerged:


1. Complex listening to support brand and sentiment analysis
While many social publishing/ engagement tools contain some element of listening, most are not designed for more complex listening functions like brand or sentiment analysis. Purpose built enterprise listening tools like Radian6, NetBase, Sysomos MAP, MutualMind, Synthesio, Ubervu, Crimson Hexagon ForSight, and Attensity 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.

2. Enterprise suites to enable cross-functional social co-ordination
The desire for stronger coordination across geographies and functions coupled with the desire to avoid data silos from disparate applications has catalyzed a trend towards integrated platforms covering multiple use cases. 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:

• 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.
• Multi-lingual support: Global enterprises often need to manage foreign language social channels. For such channels, in-line translation capabilities are important.
• Team Collaboration: 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 exponentially and can be hard to manage without sophisticated workflow capabilities.
• Asset libraries: Shared, multilingual 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.

SMMS buyers at large enterprises aiming to coordinate social across geographies and functions are well served to consider enterprise suites like Sprinklr, Spredfast and HootSuite Enterprise that are designed or evolving rapidly to address such requirements. Today, these suites are generally complemented for specific needs by “best of breed” point solutions.

For more information, visit the Social Media Category on TrustRadius to access 300 in-depth user reviews of SMMS products and a directory of over 100 solutions.