Oracle Social Cloud (legacy)

Oracle SRM is much more expensive than most of its competitors, making it only a possibility for Enterprise-level organizations. That said, Oracle SRM offers the most features compared to all other SRM products based on my own experience. For medium-sized companies and lower, I would probably go for a cheaper SRM like Hootsuite.

It's well suited if you are in a situation where you need control of the content that is published out to your channels. It provides complete trackability for every action taken by each member of staff when working with the system so you can always know who was overall responsible for any decision that was made. It's less suited to small businesses that have limited social media presence. It is very slow on being kept up to date with the native platform and the lack of ability to schedule the same post multiple times is frustrating.

It works best if users or collaborators of the platform and social media efforts had a strong relationship. If it's a tool that's not adopted by all stakeholders, it defeats the purpose of it simplifying tasks.

If you are looking to manage multiple social channels and quickly schedule posts it's a great tool. Not the best tool if you're looking to provide real time or near real time support and feedback to customers who are in the moment.

Oracle Social Relationship Management is a great way to publish to a schedule, can easily reschedule items by dragging them to a different day, good 'listening' ability. It's very expensive, so probably only suited for larger companies with multiple channels to monitor.

When you're working with numerous social media pages/accounts this helps you keep an overview and lower your workload, since you can plan a post for multiple channels and then adapt that to fit each channel. What it does less well is creating engagement. It sometimes doesn't make use of the best practices for certain posts.

It is best for high volume operations, in which you are managing multiple properties several times a day and need to track multiple conversations in the social space. If you only dabble in social or you monitor only a narrow space, there are cheaper tools out there. I believe Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) will be able to scale up across multiple divisions and countries, though we have not proven that assumption true yet.

I think it's great for a mid to large sized company, but may not be as helpful for smaller organizations due to the cost and time that has to be invested to get it up and running, and the time it takes to monitor and analyze results derived from the system.

Definitely more appropriate if you are managing multiple social media accounts. If you are only managing one Facebook account, one Twitter account and one LinkedIn account, you're better off using the sites directly, given the lack of data for Twitter.

It's well suited for monitoring competitors to determine content strategy, also it's great at using with various stakeholders within an organization to be able to assign roles/responsibilities to respond to customer needs. Customer service via social support is growing daily and tools like this are imperative for the team to be able to respond back to customers in a very timely manner.

Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) is well suited when you need to publish posts during non business hours and when someone is not able to monitor the social platforms at all hours of the day. I know us associates who are in charge of monitoring our social platforms have other duties outside of social media, so it's nice to be notified when activities take place. I haven't been involved enough to know where it is less appropriate, just yet.

Honestly, I have found no instance where SRM didn't work for what I am trying to do. If I can't figure it out on my end at first, I know that I can reach out to my account manager, and she will have the right answer for me or help me find it. The constant improvements and new features also have dramatically increased my opinion of the platform. As soon as I've identified a problem, they can usually assure me the fix will be implemented in the very near future. Overall, it really has become the backbone of growing our social media presence.

The SRM is well suited for organizations that have multiple users working across multiple channels on multiple networks. If you only have a few networks and a single organizational presence on the social web more cost effective solutions are available.

If you're new to social listening, we've found that it's helpful to have an account member/customer service explain what you're seeing and why. Oracle's representatives have been really great about staying on top of any issues that arise and getting on the phone quickly to help you solve them. It's also pretty self explanatory for new users.

I would say Vitrue is more well suited for a B2C brand, but that is the only expertise I have with the platform.

Involver may be a good fit for a company who is not too design savvy, or all that visual. It is really a pretty basic system. There are much better, more robust platforms out there now that allow for greater customization for those who want it, or better looking layouts from the start. Involver got left behind after being bought by Oracle, and in a space as fast moving as social media, it is unacceptable to fall behind. Hopefully they get their act together, build their team back up, and make it a competitive product again, but as of now it is antiquated.

Involver is great platform for brands to use if they're looking to increase social media engagment

I would say it's perfect for post scheduling, planning, and moderation (especially if more than one person is working on the brand's social activity), but I would say that it's probably not the best choice if your main concern is more about complex and truly custom app development. I would also have to point out that there are other, cheaper tools that would meet most demands for post scheduling, planning, and moderation.

I would definitely recommend ensuring the product is the right fit for the budget--this is one of the largest areas of difference we have seen between social listening tools. Although there is a wide variety of selection out there, the price varies just as widely. The colleague should also make sure they have someone dedicated to using the tool on a regular basis to get the most benefit from it. They should also be willing to use it for their own analysis purposes, by which I mean be prepared to export the data and manually manipulate conversations to get the desired reporting. In fact, manual analysis has been one of the key uses of this product for us.

Understand the publishing aspect, the tabs side of the house and the analytics. We found native analytics to be more accurate than Vitrue's so ended up not even using that feature. Know where your gaps are and ensure Vitrue can fill them.

If you're managing multiple social accounts for multiple clients, I recommend using Vitrue as it allows you to easily keep clients separate from one another

Overall, we were satisfied with Vitrue for our basic promotions. We have yet to try it for a more complex campaign, so I'd be interested to see how the user experience will be with something that requires a lot more content.