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Bye-bye, Hootsuite? Salesforce Launches Social Studio, an Enterprise Platform to Win Them All

Watch out, Hootsuite: Salesforce is set to launch a new enterprise solution for social media management, and it looks like it’s going to be huge. Called Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio, the new platform is set to do it all with collaborative management for teams, a scheduling and publishing suite, customer engagement workflows, in-depth analytics and integration with third-party services.

Social Studio combines two of Salefoce’s recent acquisitions, Radian6 and Buddy Media, in a totally new product available as part of Salesforce’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. Designed to be incredibly comprehensive while driven by ExactTarget’s 1:1 marketing focus, Social Studio will allow enterprise marketing teams to collaborate on social media and improve their strategies along the way. “We rebuilt the whole product,” former Buddymedia co-founder and CEO and current ExactTarget CMO Michael Lazerow told VentureBeat. “It’s enterprise-scale, but simple as Facebook. This is the only social platform for social listening, and engagement, and analytics and marketing.”

Here’s a rundown of what Social Studio will offer:

Collaboration

Workspaces for team collaboration are built into Social Studio. This means that marketers can set up teams by brand, region or product to work on separate content while maintaining their ability to collaborate across environments. Workflows allow team members to accomplish tasks like submitting posts to higher-ups for approval and assigning customer responses to particular members.

Planning and Publishing Social Media Content

Like other social media publishing platforms, Social Studio allows you to compose and schedule posts by social network and account, utilizing your desired link shortener and adding appropriate media like photos and videos as you go. A really helpful tool available from the compose window is the ability to insert trending content from third-party sources including Kontera, RSS feeds, Shutterstock, Trendspottr and YouTube. Salesforce will also offer APIs and SDKs to allow for further custom integrations, Lazerow told TechCrunch. An example of this would be adding apps and features for specific industries.

One of the most attractive features of Social Studio, in my opinion, will be its calendar view. View scheduled posts by day, week or month in a calendar view. Show or hide posts by social accounts, post status (i.e. scheduled, published or awaiting approval), labels, media type or author. Clicking on a post lets you preview it, see who created it and, for published posts, track its performance through engagement rates for likes, comments, shares and clicks. In this way marketing teams can see what kinds of posts perform best and adjust upcoming posts accordingly.

Customer Relationships

True to ExactTarget’s 1:1 marketing focus, Social Studio makes it easy to see what customers are saying to you or about you and reply to them accordingly. Marketers can reply through public responses or direct messages themselves or assign responses to the appropriate team member.

Analytics

Where would an enterprise social media marketing platform be in today’s data-driven world without in-depth analytics? Social Studio’s analytics let you see how your posts are performing across each social account. It also provides you a list of your most successful posts, sortable by labels, media types and author. Finally, account reports are customizable and downloadable so you can track your progress over time and continue making informed marketing decisions.

Mobile App

Social Studio’s mobile app lets marketers manage their social presence while on the go, including by following campaign progress through real-time analytics and the ability to rout and respond to customer conversations.

With many enterprise companies already hooked on Salesforce, I’d expect many companies to ditch Hootsuite altogether and rely on Social Studio as their integrated social media marketing and social media customer service platform. Smaller companies, though, with no need for Social Studio’s intensive team capabilities, might stick with Hootsuite for its lower price.

Social Studio is available starting tomorrow at no additional cost to existing ExactTarget users, according to VentureBeat. ExactTarget subscriptions start at $1,500/month.