Jack of all trades, master of none
April 13, 2018

Jack of all trades, master of none

Jeremy Cowles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (Radian6 + Buddy Media)

As Social Studio has capabilities for scheduling and publishing as well as analysis, it is being used by both the marketing department (for monitoring mentions of the company in the media and scheduling of organic brand posting) and the insight team who primarily use the analysis functionality. For the marketing team it appears to be a good solution for ticking multiple boxes in-one, particularly publishing and engaging, while for the insight team the analytics piece helps us keep tabs on multiple brand searches in the media in order to evaluate marketing performance.
  • One stop shop: if you are looking for a tool that combines multiple facets found in individual tools then this could be for you
  • Scheduling posts is a breeze across platform. So this is clearly geared towards marketers or community managers who need a quick and simple way to manage communications output
  • Salesforce is a ubiquitous platform these days - social studio is a natural extension of this (the engage and CRM functionality plays to this strength) so for businesses of any size that subscribe to the Salesforce suite, adding this tool would make total sense
  • The user interface is rather simplistic which can be seen as a pro - intuitive and easy to navigate, and more quickly accessible for newbies over rival platforms which can have steep learning curves and layers of detailed functionality which take time to get familiar with
  • Jack of all trades, master of none: OK so this might sound a bit harsh, but while the tool accomplished three similar functions competently, and all under one bonnet, the fact that none of them are outstanding in functionality and capability in my book that also counts as a weakness, regardless of the fact they are all combined in one software suite. It would seem that Salesforce needs to think more carefully about who the target user audience is here - publishers, sellers and marketers, or insight types who work with the content - it's a bit lacklustre in all three areas
  • Simplicity vs total control: I mentioned previously that it has a very intuitive, accessible and 'simplistic' (in a good way) UI which makes getting to grips with the tool great for early adopters. BUT with this comes the downfall that it is rather simplistic, and the rich functionality that is available in other platforms is just not seen here. For example, the engagement scores for competitor brands (not client / owned brands) are not available, meaning you can't do deeper dive analysis on content performance for rival organizations. The ability to only export content in 90 day chunks is also frustrating
  • For such a large organisation, think about how much support you're going to need from Salesforce. You might have to be prepared to wing it on your own
5 - Marketing and Communications Insight. This encompasses people in the group marketing team who use the tool to schedule brand posts across multiple social touchpoints and use the Engage tool to monitor uptake and reaction to posting, and tie back with leads and existing contacts in our CRM database. The Insight team uses the analyse side of the tool to evaluate brand and competitor mentions in the media with a view to providing insight and intelligence reports on brand activity and marketing performance
  • The one-stop-shop aspect enables us to combine multiple tool functionality into one subscription
  • Integration with Salesforce is a key selling point meaning we can coordinate all activity with a constant reference to CRM data
  • It is a little light on functionality in some areas (analyse as the prime example) so you may find you'll need to spend on an alternative / supplementary platform to fulfil the use-case requirements here
Given that Social Studio has 3 key functions, it appeals to three key audiences who may or may not be in the same team. Therefore it is a nice tool when considering uptake outside of one team within an organization. It is a simple and effective approach to fulfilling a number of the classic functions needed to work with and measure social media all in one place. However, as said before, this idea of bundling three individual suites into one solution does leave some weak spots and room for improvement. Certainly from a social / media listening perspective we have had to evaluate and use alternative tools as Social Studio did not stack up in terms of granularity of detail, KPI measurement and sheer functionality when compared to those stand-alone, specialist platforms.
If you're tasked with publishing content to social on behalf of your organization then this tool is certainly worth considering. You have quick and easy capability to schedule across multiple platforms with drag-and-drop simplicity. It ties into Salesforce's real strength of its CRM platform so you can quickly tie social activity and leads to those already in your database. And it does a good job at monitoring and analyzing brand and competitor content across multiple media types.

Having said that, if you're into deep-dive and full functionality SaaS tools then this might not be for you as it covers three areas adequately, but not in enough detail or strength to make it a star performer

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring) Feature Ratings

Boolean keyword searches
4
Filtering out noise/spam
7
Sentiment analysis
7
Broad channel coverage
7
Content planning and scheduling
9
Audience targeting
7
Content optimization
5
Workflow management
7
Automated routing and prioritization
5
Customer interaction histories
6
Bulk actions
6
Lead generation
6
Content marketing
6
Paid media management
5
Campaigns and promotions
6
Twitter
8
Facebook
8
LinkedIn
8
Google+
5
Instagram
4
Pinterest
5
YouTube
5
Campaign success analytics
6
Real-time tracking
6
Competitor analysis
4
Mobile access
5