List of Social Media Management Systems (SMMS)

Pain: Social Media Teams Are Challenged To Respond To the Distributed Conversations
I’m starting to get a few briefings and requests from strategists LaSandra Brill, about new technologies that enable social marketers to quickly manage, maintain, and conduct reporting on multiple channels. The issue of lack of scale is resonating with social strategists –as a result, the market is developing new tools that will help them manage them. This is one component of Social CRM, which if you haven’t heard about, please read the report on the 18 use cases of Social CRM. (Update: This is only one software segment in the overall Social Business Stack, which you should first understand)

A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang

Above is the full report, feel free to read, download and share.


Update: Jan 5th, 2012. After nearly two years of watching this nascent market, Altimeter has published a report segmenting the growing vendor space.

Solution: As a Result, Social Media Management Systems are Emerging
Like CMS and WMS for centralized website management, Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) empower social media teams to manage multiple distributed social channels from one location –enabling the opportunity to build deeper relationships by being in more places at once.

Definition: Social Media Management Systems are collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a disparate social media environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based and enable the manager to listen, aggregate, publish, and manage multiple social media channels from one tool.

How it works: Three simple features In the most basic sense, these management tools do the following: 1) connect with social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. 2) Allow the manager to quickly publish from one location to each of those channels, some provide ability to customize to each channel 3) Aggregate and Manage social data. The system allows the manager to see an aggregated view of what’s happening (from views to comments) and may offer some form of analytics and conversion metrics.

List of Social Media Management Systems (SMMS)
Sorted by alphabetized order by parent company, not in priority or capability.

  1. Argyle Social: Provides features to publish and schedule, manage a social inbox, measuring tools, and white label solutions.
  2. Awareness Networks, Social Marketing Hub an enterprise class community platform has launched their own tool that has Facebook, youtube, flickr, Twitter, and of course connect with their own community features. In particular, this is an existing enterprise class vendor (previously I’ve published thorough research report on them) which bodes well to their level of potential levels of service, support, and market viability. (they’ve briefed me)
  3. Buddy Media: Has a set of management tools that help brands with Facebook, Twitter, and monitoring and reporting.  You’ll find iterations for both brands and agencies.  They have case studies from large brands and media on their site.
  4. Constant Contact: Purchased Nutshell Mail which has keyword monitoring systems that can empower small business owners to receive alerts about their social networking accounts.  On Feb 28th they acquired SCRM company Bantam Live which has some SMMS features, for sales and marketers. (hat tip to Dan Ziman)
  5. Context Optional offers management tools for moderating Facebook pages
  6. Conversocial: Offers solutions to help managers to  plan updates and learn what type of content resonates the most with your fans and followers in social networks like Facebook and Twitter
  7. CoTweet was recently acquired by ExactTarget.  They provide Twitter integration tools, scheduling, workflow, listening tools, multiple author management, and management dashboard tools
  8. Distributed Engagement Channel by DEC   Their system offers the ability to publish content, moderate UGC submissions, and track and optimize channel performance.  They also have features such as ID integration, media handling, and reporting.
  9. Engage Sciences: Allows marketers to launch social promotions to engage customers on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and corporate websites, whilst aggregating, filtering and storing streams from across the social web to allow companies to easily showcase the voices of advocates.
  10. Engage121: This group focuses on: Enhance brand image through consistent social media messaging, Empower local outlets with social engagement tools to get started in social media, Mobilize employees as brand ambassadors, Monitor and manage permissions of thousands of local agents and franchises
  11. Expion Expion allows large Enterprises to publish and aggregate social media conversations that can scale to hundreds of local based Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and YouTube channels, etc. The tool has the ability to listen, publish, manage, respond, govern, and glean intelligence across these channels.
  12. Hootsuite Integrates Facebook and LinkedIn accounts. Whereas before you could update Facebook and LinkedIn through Ping.fm functionality, things are different now. Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are treated similarly to Twitter accounts: you can create columns from these social networks, read your friends’ status updates, and update multiple Facebook accounts. Facebook integration offers in-line commenting.
  13. Involver: Audience Management Platform provides marketers with the solution for publishing content, monitoring conversations, managing applications, and tracking performance.
  14. MediaFunnel offers integration with Facebook and Twitter. They have several permission based workflows that include a variety of roles such as a contributor, administrators, publishers.  This is not unlike traditional editorial processes used in CMS systems.
  15. MessageMaker: A social media management system (SMMS) that lets you publish and manage targeted content across a large number of social interaction points while generating actionable intelligence.
  16. Moderation Marketplace Provides Social Media Management and Content Aggregation solution designed to be delivered to your clients under your brand.
  17. Mutual Mind offers brand monitoring, permission based workflow as well as reporting tools.
  18. Objective Marketer provides managers ability to structure their messages by campaigns, features include User Management with roles and permissions and workflows, scheduled content, integration,  analytics and reporting.  The tell me their current client makeup  is 60% Enterprises, 30% Agencies and 10% Bloggers / Independent Consultants.  (in Jan 2011, Objective Marketer was acquired by Email Vision)
  19. Postling allows for individual clients or brand to manage assets like blog, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter account, and Flickr accounts from a single management system. There is also comment aggregation as well as workflow between teams.
  20. Seesmic. Seesmic offers support for multiple Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Ping.fm, Foursquare and Google Buzz accounts. Also offered on iPhone,  Android wp7 and Blackberry.  Languages translation support includes: English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and more.  Seesmic has received investments from Salesforce and has an integrated offering with Chatter.
  21. Shoutlet offers a multi-user application that helps global brands, small businesses, and marketing agencies build, engage, and measure all of their social media marketing communication via one platform.
  22. SocialVolt Provides STUDIO which is a complete social media management platform that integrates all the tools a company needs to successfully engage with their clients on the social web.
  23. SpredFast is an up and comer who recently briefed me, this Austin based company offers the core features and claims to have a 40% enterprise customer base. They have partners with Convio, Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Sysomos, Trackkr, IBM, Porter Novelli, Sierra Club, HomeAway. They position their product as collaborative campaign management and offer features such as scheduling content, features that integrate with events and social stream like features similar to Friendfeed. (they’ve briefed me)
  24. Sprinklr offers social media management tools, it’s interesting their website has a strong focus on listening first, before the publication.
  25. SproutSocial: Sprout Social brings it all together to help you listen, engage and build loyalty to grow your audience and your business.
  26. Strongmail, a traditional email marketing platform offers platform that tracks the multi-stage sharing activity of the campaign all the way to conversion, analysis on reach, sharing activity, CT’s, feedback on Facebook fan page wall posts.
  27. Syncapse (formerly SocialTalk) provides integration with Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and MoveableType, this management tool provides governance, workflow, scheduling and other features.
  28. Targeted: Targeted ESPâ„¢ (Enterprise Social Port): A social media management system that is designed specifically for large enterprise networks, channel management and distribution networks. Targeted ESPâ„¢ is specifically designed to syndicate content and empower the end user while reducing the workload for corporate management. The platform allows not only the distribution of corporate-approved messaging to the local level, but also the aggregation of direct social network data and social intelligence reporting metrics.
  29. Vitrue: Update may 2012: Now acquired by Oracle. social media management systems, that has integration with Facebook and Twitter, they offer scheduling features, and the ability to link multiple Facebook pages together.
  30. Webtrends: Webtrends offers a solution to help marketers quickly define and execute on social marketing strategy. Solutions is offered as self and full service subscription plans to meet various social marketing needs.
  31. Wildfire: Offers features for social sweepstakes that promote word of mouth as well as ability to manage and publish from their platform to multiple social networks, with analytics.

Retired
 This vendors never want to market or went into deadpool

  1. KeenKong offers a dashboard like management tool that not only aggregates the conversation from Twitter and Facebook, but tries to make sense of it from Natural Language Processing. (Update March 2011, they have since gone stealth and never launched, hat tip to Blake for pointing this out.)

Guiding Principles
Before you jump into the market and utilize these tools, first follow this guiding principles.

  • Get personal with your market –avoid social media spewing: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Spewing corporate content to every known social channel may make your life easier as a marketer, but could cause serious ramifications to the trust of your community. Remember that like fraternity row, each frat and sorority house has a different set of relationships, language, and interests –don’t think one type of content will fit all.
  • It’s the people stupid –not carpet bombing: One of the promises of social is to build meaningful relationships with customers –not apply traditional spray and pray marketing tactics. By using these tools, you could be missing out on true relationships that could be deeper, with more loyalty, and the benefits of advocacy.
  • Don’t get spread too thin: Being in all places at all times can mean you’re nowhere all the time. Pick your battles and remember that the needs of the LinkedIn community are far different than those of MySpace, be selective by first knowing your socialgraphics of your customer base.

Use These Tools After You’ve Developed a Social Strategy
Every technology has upsides and downsides, there are always tradeoffs. While these tools may help social strategists manage an unscalable situation — they have downsides:

Industry Insights: A Commodity Feature, With Bandwagon Appeal
Expect nearly every community platform (there are over 100) to launch these types of features, quickly followed by host of startups that specialize in this, then also the CoTweets of the world and other Twitter platforms like Seesmic to quickly get into the enterprise game. In a few quarters, expect the traditional CMS and WMS players to finally wake up and get relevant, followed by app developers in Salesforce appexchange to launch their own iterations. In the long run, this will be commodity set of features, just a check off in the overall suite of social business software but an important component of Social CRM.

If you know a vendor that offers these features, please leave a comment, I’ll take a closer look, and plan to take some briefings with some of these vendors.  Note: I’m making many changes to this post, it’s being altered in near real time

338 Replies to “List of Social Media Management Systems (SMMS)”

  1. Do you think there is a potential negative SEO impact for identical content to be distributed to multiple sites?

  2. Do you think there is a potential negative SEO impact for identical content to be distributed to multiple sites?

  4. Yes, we offer non-profit discounts! Please feel free to contact me ken at spredfast dot com. Great article Jeremiah and glad we were able to say hello on the streets of downtown Austin in SXSW.

  5. Yes, we offer non-profit discounts! Please feel free to contact me ken at spredfast dot com. Great article Jeremiah and glad we were able to say hello on the streets of downtown Austin at SXSWi.

  6. I agree with you regarding spew. The ultimate judge of spew will be your audience. Measuring the effectiveness of how well your messages are resonating is essential. For instance, if you have a high level of activity (lots of tweets, status updates, etc), and very low audience engagement (click-thrus, retweets, replies, etc), you have “spew” and you will see you a major decrease in reach (followers, fans, subscribers, etc.). The good social media management systems, ahem Spredfast, will measure this and help social media marketers optimize their engagement from both a content quality and quantity perspective. Loss of reach = loss of brand trust = loss of job.

  7. I agree with you regarding spew. The ultimate judge of spew will be your audience. Measuring the effectiveness of how well your messages are resonating is essential. For instance, if you have a high level of activity (lots of tweets, status updates, etc), and very low-level of audience engagement (click-thrus, retweets, replies, etc), you have “spew” and you will see a major decrease in reach (followers, fans, subscribers, etc.). The good social media management systems, ahem Spredfast, will measure this and help social media marketers optimize their engagement from both a content quality and quantity perspective. Loss of reach = loss of brand trust = loss of job.

  8. Great summary Jeremiah. The 'simple features' you listed above are the key 3 reasons Cisco will be moving forward with one of these companies soon. There are also lots of 'cool' features like a branded short URL or white labeled updates on Twitter (so it will say from Cisco vs. from Tweetdeck for example). Also thanks for the mention!

  9. Great summary Jeremiah. The 'simple features' you listed above are the key 3 reasons Cisco will be moving forward with one of these companies soon. There are also lots of 'cool' features like a branded short URL or white labeled updates on Twitter (so it will say from Cisco vs. from Tweetdeck for example). Also thanks for the mention!

  12. Jeremiah,

    As always, great interpretation of the marketplace. (Full disclosure to those reading – I am VP of marketing @ Awareness)

    The message from Awareness is “stay tuned” – we have a bunch of surprises in store in the coming months. We typically have gone to market with community at the center of the social universe and the Hub is a big shift for us. We listened to our customers and the market and realized that most organizations view community as a tactic as opposed to “the” channel. This gave us the ability to tie in our enterprise features – security, control, moderation, etc – to the broader social web. Our philosophy now is that while community is an important channel, it's not the only channel enterprise marketers should use when going to market. The brands we are working with to develop this product – Sony, USA Today, Best Buy, Kayak, Progressive, etc – have all had input in the product road map, development and pricing and we believe we are positioned to meet the needs of marketers at the largest brands. The Hub is just the tip of the iceberg for Awareness. In the coming months we intend to continue to push the envelope in the social media space and continue innovating.

    Mike

  13. Hello!!

    Congratulations! It's an interesting list, very complete, but I miss Hootsuite. Isn't Hootsuite a right SMMS?

    Thank you!

  14. You should check out the Involver platform “ they have some really cool tools for managing various social networks. My digital marketing team at Levi's has been leveraging the service for the last 3 months and have been impressed with their capabilities.

  15. You should check out the Involver platform “ they have some really cool tools for managing various social networks. My digital marketing team at Levi's has been leveraging the service for the last 3 months and have been impressed with their capabilities.

  16. Not surprising that all of the comments here are from SMMS companies pushing their wares. You all may find out that real social media can't be controlled and managed at the corporate level. Can Social Media really be managed in this way??? The premise is yes but my guess is that the reality is no. Reminds me of when Push technology was all the rage. Think I'll return in 5 years time to see how may of these posters shilling their wares are still in business. Visited Awareness.Com' customer pagee and linking over to 'sites' I see 60% are either 404 or have dropped the platform. HMMMM…

  17. Not surprising that all of the comments here are from SMMS companies pushing their wares. You all may find out that real social media can't be controlled and managed at the corporate level. Can Social Media really be managed in this way??? The premise is yes but my guess is that the reality is no. Reminds me of when Push technology was all the rage. Think I'll return in 5 years time to see how may of these posters shilling their wares are still in business. Visited Awareness.Com' customer pagee and linking over to 'sites' I see 60% are either 404 or have dropped the platform. HMMMM…

  18. Great post, especially the section about SMMS as part of a developed social strategy.

    Shoutlet (shoutlet.com) should be on this list as well. It combines video, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook account updating, RSS, podcasts, SMS, social bookmarking tools, widgets, and more. Plus, it tracks it all in-platform. Enterprise features help companies with multiple brands manage/track social as well. Too much to mention here; contact us for a walk-through.

    Thanks!
    Kara Martens @Shoutlet

  19. Great post, especially the section about SMMS as part of a developed social strategy.

    Shoutlet (shoutlet.com) should be on this list as well. It combines video, e-mail, Twitter and Facebook account updating, RSS, podcasts, SMS, social bookmarking tools, widgets, and more. Plus, it tracks it all in-platform. Enterprise features help companies with multiple brands manage/track social as well. Too much to mention here; contact us for a walk-through.

    Thanks!
    Kara Martens @Shoutlet

  24. Alex, we appreciate your comments. I should point out that at the time of your post, the Awarenessnetworks.com PAGE was in the midst of a complete redesign so I apologize if you were not able to locate our customer sites. Please feel free to take a look at the current site and provide any feedback, we welcome your suggestions.

    Regarding your assertion that social media can not be controlled at the corporate level “ I beg to differ. I think where you are getting confused is a brand™s ability to control what is said about them vs. what they say about themselves. If what you are referring to is the former, we are in agreement. If you mean the latter, I could not disagree more. The messages a brand delivers through social media (again, the corporate messaging) should be controlled and managed. I have not heard of ANY brand that freely says Publish whatever you want, without guidelines or restrictions. The implication of this on any public company could be severe to say the least. For more evidence, check out companies like Dell, JetBlue, Zappos, Ford, etc that have been highlighted and awarded for their managed, centralized approach to social media at a corporate level.

    The tools listed above, Awareness included, give brands the ability to manage the content they are posting and distributing through the social web. You may not work in a large enterprise, but I assure you this is a major issue for them as content is typically coming from multiple departments and individuals and can lead to a lack of brand consistency and messaging. If you would like to chat about this in more detail, feel free to drop me a line.

  25. Would SMMS be considered a component of Enterprise Social Software or are the words synonymous?

  26. I use TweetDeck combined with Constant Contact's Nutshell Mail. I have NM send at 7am and 2pm then I respond through TweetDeck to Facebook, twitter, linkedin and google buzz, which are updated all at once. It has dramatically increased my efficiency and decreased the time spent in what can be a black hole of social media. I also throughout the day see updates pop up on my upper right hand corner of the screen and it just takes a second to see if there is something I can respond to or retweet.

  27. I am the Co-Founder and former CTO of ThePort Network. For the last year I have had a small team in the Philippines working on what you are calling SMMS. We have a strong listening and publishing component and an email digest similar to NutShellMail. IMHO, the vast majority of small businesses need something simple. If they listen they will discover very few people are actually talking about them. But they have to listen just the same.We have an aggregator to listen to their industry and competitors and to curate content they think appropriate to their audience. We support global publishing to multiple networks and scheduling. What sets us apart is we license a turnkey solution so business with existing client bases can offer SMMS under their own brand making it a potential revenue generator. We believe that it is not in the best longterm strategic interest of most businesses to see a third party offering the solution to their existing client base. Demo can be seen at http://www.moderationmarketplace.com.

  28. Radian6 is the clear market leader when you look at the feature set of all the tools. I'm in the process of purchasing a tool and found that most lack key features such as deep reporting, routing, and managing volume.

  29. Thanks for adding Expion. We are excited about being part of the SMMS space and see tremendous growth opportunities for Enterprises who want to go local.

  30. It is for my company and they really help manage all aspects and well as great reporting. The key that puts them above most is the workflow built into the service that easily allows for engagement.

  33. Where is Jive Software on this list? Jive does social media monitoring a management but also integrates with your intranet. It's too common that the people on the outside cannot communicate what's going on to the people on the inside, which is why it's such a compelling product.

  34. Thanks for posting this list and keeping it uptodate. I am learning CRM in management school and seriously felt the need of something to do the same with Social Medium. Although I dont find any big brothers in SMMS, I feel that they are to come …

  35. Jeremiah,
    Thanks for compiling this great listing of social media management systems. Your blog posts are all excellent.

  37. This article is really beneficial. Helps a great deal for the Chicago SEO company I’m working with. thank you. Looking forward to more.

  39. Great list! As someone who writes “lists of tools” types of articles all of the time I know you’re gonna get bombarded with the “hey whataboutme??” comments 🙂 but I think you highlighted the really high-quality tools in here. Tough to get a comprehensive list and even tougher to acurately “taxonomize” them.

    Cheers,

    Janet Aronica
    Community Manager
    oneforty

  41. As an up and comer in Social Media Strategy, trying to research all the different Social Media Management Platforms has cause me many headaches. I currently use cotweet to manage my brands but what I really want is one universal platform that not only allows me to schedule DIFFERENT tweets and facebook posts (not integrated), but also provides valuable insights that include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Analytics. I’ve been reading about hootsuite’s new updates that feature customized analytics reports and also allows you to share these reports with team members listed on the account. However, I would like to know if this platform allows you to export this data and store it to my hard drive. Also, are there other platforms that have all these features? Or is it more beneficial to have separate platforms for managing and then analytics? I know hootsuite’s developments are relatively recent, but if anyone has tested it out I would appreciate your feedback.

  42. You can erase Bantamlive from your list. Constant Contact announced yesterday they would kill bantamlive im July and all customerdata. That makes people not going into the cloud with their business data…

  43. Social media is one types of Channel maker. As the process to moving a marketer or finder to easier, Also real time change can make more things to do it.

  46. Hi Jeremiah,

    Here at Cisco, I am using Involver platform. Involver got everything the brand needs to grow starting from managing campaigns, tracking searches, filtering, monitoring and more. I think you can add it to your list.

    Anyway, I started using Sprinklr because it offers all the features same as Involver but for FREE. My vote goes to Sprinklr, and I advise everyone to start using it.

    Regards,

  47. Hi Jeremiah,

    Here at Cisco, I am using Involver platform. Involver got everything the brand needs to grow starting from managing campaigns, tracking searches, filtering, monitoring and more. I think you can add it to your list.

    Anyway, I started using Sprinklr because it offers all the features same as Involver but for FREE. My vote goes to Sprinklr, and I advise everyone to start using it.

    Regards,

  48. What platform do you recommend for scheduling photo posts? I am a consultant for retail boutiques where pictures can say $1,000. Thanks!

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  51. We use Sendible and it’s a really easy to use dashboard..it helped us out a lot!..why is it not it on your list?

  52. We use Sendible and it’s a really easy to use dashboard..it helped us out a lot!..why is it not it on your list?

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  56. I agree with your opinion on “spew”. Ultimately, your audience will be the judge of whether or not your messages are effective. It’s important to measure how well your messages are resonating in order to determine their effectiveness. For example, if you’re very active on social media (posting lots of tweets, status updates, etc.), but your audience isn’t engaging with your content (clicking through to your links, retweeting, replying, etc.), then you’re essentially “spewing” content. This will lead to a major decrease in your reach (followers, fans, subscribers, etc.). Good social media management systems like Spredfast can help social media marketers measure the engagement and optimize their content from both a quality and quantity perspective. Wings Bird Pro

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