Let’s say you work at a company that has 20 Twitter handles and 20 Facebook pages. Then you likely have 100 people who are potentially content contributors and twice as many people who are interested in the results of efforts on your Twitter and Facebook pages. Enter Social Media Management Systems (SMMS). These are tools designed to help enterprise customers better manage and track their activities on social media platforms. Read some of Jeremiah Owyangs posts about SMMS‘s for more background. If you’re in the market for an SMMS, read on.
One thing I’ve learned from hearing countless vendor pitches from companies proposing to solve any and all of my social needs: no solution is perfect.
When looking for an SMMS, please keep that in mind. Every vendor has strenghts and weaknesses, and they’re all trying to prove the features you need right now. Realistically, the space is changing so quickly, it’s difficult to say which vendor is at the top of the pile because the landscape is constantly evolving. The best you can do is understand your needs explicitly and then see if there’s a tool out there that might help.
Here are some tips I’d recommend to others who might be exploring SMMS options for their brands:
- Think realistically about the personalities of your users. Ultimately, adoption of an SMMS is key to getting value. So, if the tool is too complicated for the people you want to use it, then it doesn’t really matter how feature rich it is. We learned this the hard way. It might be better to take a simpler tool with slightly reduced functionality, if your users aren’t necessarily focused on SM.
- Understand what kind of load the tool is built to handle. If you have hundreds of accounts with hundreds of users, does the SMMS’s system have the capacity to still process functions quickly? Drill them on this one, and ask for similar client use-cases.
- Map out exactly what your workflow will be for publishing content, acquiring content from multiple sources, monitoring content after it goes live and responding to content. Unfortunately, a lot of these tools don’t give you good test trials so you can’t really find out some of this until you’re fully spun up. It’s important to see if the SMMS you pick will fit in with your existing workflow, or at least offer a better alternative to what you’re already doing.
- Think about what functionality you like on the social platforms you use, and ask if those are mirrored through the SMMS. For example – you can’t tag another page in a status update using an SMMS, from what I understand none of the tools offers this, but it’s a good idea to start a list of that kind of functionality so you can set expectations internally on when you might have to veer away from the SMMS. Another scenario we ran into was with YouTube. While you can schedule videos to go live at a certain time using NVIDIA’s vendor, we couldn’t access the embed code early – we need that embed c ode for blog posts that we schedule to go up at specific times, so we discovered that although there was YT uploading functionality, it didn’t solve our problem.
- As with all these new services, try to find some kind of guarantee that once you’re through the door, your will have a service rep on hand to help with training and support. As enterprise users, we have insights that the people making the tool don’t – so our feedback should be integrated and timelines/roadmaps should be flexible to accommodate that feedback. Again, our vendor started out very rusty on this but they’ve improved over the last couple of months.
- Know that none of these vendors is perfect, and no matter what you’ll have to do a little bit of shoehorning to make the solution work for you. Just make sure you go to the vendors with a clear idea of what you want to achieve and then see if their proposal fits that.
Happy shopping 
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