What is Socialware?

Socialware provides social marketing tools for regulated industries like banking and insurance. It helps companies automate outbound social campaigns while focusing on compliance with corporate standards and industry regulation. Customers include some large banks, insurance companies, and retail networks. Socialware was acquired by Proofpoint in 2015, and is now integrated into Proofpoint's Social Media Security and Compliance product.

Categories & Use Cases

Social Media Management

LinkedIn
The software allows users to monitor, publish and respond via LinkedIn, including Groups.
Category average: 8.6
Twitter
The software allows users to monitor, publish and respond via Twitter.
Category average: 8.8
Facebook
The software allows users to monitor, publish and respond via Facebook.
Category average: 8.8

Customer interaction histories
Users can view the entire customer conversation history when responding to a mention.
Category average: 8.2
Campaign success analytics
Users can analyze the success of campaigns through metrics such as likes, shares, retweets, followers, clicks and conversions.
Category average: 7.7
Lead generation
Users can discover and engage with new prospects, based on certain parameters.
Category average: 7.5

Verified User

Employee in Sales (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

It works with the three major social media sites: Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
The ability to limit the functionality of the social media sites through a customization profile is great. It allows us to create a user specific profile based on an advisor's individual needs. Depending on an advisor's particular business, we can choose to allow or not allow specific actions based on those individual needs.

Cons

Social media changes quickly. It will be important for Socialware to expand to other sites outside of Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Socialware works based on the setting you have to set up in your internet browser. This means you have to access the social media sites through a specific computer that has those browser settings. If you log in through another source, it notifies the Compliance department which requires an advisor to log back in and submit their profile for approval.
Because the programming of social media sites changes so often, it greatly affects the overall usability of Socialware. Functionally is periodically down until Socialware can figure out a work around to their programming.
Socialware really needs to provide more resources on getting a new user up and running. I know they have some paid content on best practices but a they need a better user manual that's free.

Return on Investment

At this point, we haven't seen any direct benefit to using Socialware for our social media. It is mainly used to increase our online presence.

Other Software Used

Salesforce.com, Act-On

Verified User

Consultant in Social Media (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

It allows the user to sync an existing LinkedIn/Twitter/Facebook profile to a third-party platform that allows compliance teams to manage and moderate the social media profiles of financial advisors.
It has the ability to archive all past submissions and posts, useful for moderation and management teams.
It has the ability to ensure that no posts go live before moderation (if firm policy requires it), minimizing risk.
The Voices tool is especially useful as it allows users to post content immediately from a list of pre-approved marketing pieces.

Cons

The campaign feature in the Voices tool is weak. It currently does not allow users to auto-publish from more than one campaign category, and the only option for a time-frame is "daily." While being able to select a time of day is great, having a post go out daily (especially for LinkedIn-only users) is not ideal. Many of our users love the idea of being able to auto-publish some content, but this feature is limiting.
Many of the features are not intuitive or user-friendly.
Users experience many glitches when utilizing this software that causes frustration among our clients as well as management teams.