Feeling Lost Trying to Navigate the Social Software Market? You’re Not Alone.

Eight months ago, I was tasked with researching the social media software marketplace for a buyers’ guide my company was putting together. The assignment seemed simple enough, given my background researching software markets and firsthand experience reporting on social listening tools for customer service. However, I quickly encountered a few challenges to my progress:

• One, because the market is growing so quickly, it has become extremely fragmented–what one vendor calls Social CRM another might call social relationship building.


• Two, these products are so diverse, it’s difficult to know what features actually address companies’ specific pain points. Alternatively, the use cases for more established software markets are well known and standardized.

To help address the first obstacle, I created a tool called The Social App Map. It’s meant to help companies gain a broad overview of the industry by identifying the five standard social software categories, as well as the three to four most-common features that fall into each category. These are included in a filter in the app map that companies can use to quickly find out which vendors offer what features. Or, you can simply click on any logo in the map to learn more about that specific application.

This assumes, however, that you know which features are best suited for addressing your company’s specific pain points. This gets back to the second challenge I mentioned–prioritizing which features your company should be evaluating. Here, I’ll provide three tips companies can use to determine which features you should be evaluating.

Tip #1: Gather Input From Every Department

One of the most crucial steps in the software evaluation process is engaging a variety users in the evaluation process. This step is particularly important for social software selection because these systems can stretch across several (or all departments). Engaging your team is important for both identifying which pain points they most want to address with automation, but also for ensuring buy-in once the system is purchased (because there’s nothing worse than spending thousands on software that ends up being highly underutilized).

You can ask this question generally, then be more specific to social media. What obstacles keep them from doing their jobs better? What challenges do they face in increasing efficiently? Do they think they are able to capitalize on every opportunity in social? What kinds of opportunities to they think they are missing out on in social?

Tip #2: Align Challenges with the Right App Category

There are several buckets of challenges that are commonly associated with different kinds of software categories. Don’t worry–if you have challenges that fall into more than one bucket that does’t necessarily mean you need several different products. Consider uberVU (which I included in my Social App Map)– they offer features for Social Media Monitoring, Social Media Management and Social Media CRM. Below is a list of “challenge” buckets that are typically associated with each social app category:

Social Media Monitoring:

• You lack a holistic view of conversations happening online about your brand.


• You lack a holistic view of conversations happening online about your industry.


• You know you could be doing better on social, but you don’t know what needs to change.


• Your team wastes time toggling between tools and/or platforms monitoring conversations about your brand on social.

Social Media Management:

• Your team wastes time toggling between tools and/or platforms responding to tweets/messages directed towards your corporate-owned handles.


• Your team wastes time toggling between tools and/or platforms while publishing new content on social media.


• You know your content could perform better, but you don’t know what needs to change.


• You don’t know the best tactics for optimizing content for social media.

Social Media Marketing / Advertising:

• You can’t prove the ROI of your social media campaigns.


• You know your ads and marketing campaigns could do better, but you don’t know how to improve them.


• You don’t have a means for efficiently reporting on your social media campaigns and ads.


• You don’t have a means for efficiently targeting your campaigns to a particular audience.

Social CRM:

• You’re missing opportunities to connect with opportunities on social.


• Customer satisfaction is suffering because you’re missing questions/comments/concerns from customers on social media.


• Your support team doesn’t have the full customer interaction history because part of it happened on social.

Social Communities / Business Collaboration:

• Your team is very large and locationally dispersed–it’s impossible to collaborate.


• Your team wastes time toggling between tools and/or platforms trying to find the internal content they need.


• Your online self-service content is under utilized and you’re not sure why.

Tip #3: What’s Measured Improves–Brainstorm the ‘What’

One of the areas where social applications vary the most is in their reporting and analytics capabilities. Before beginning your search, it’s important you understand exactly what you want to measure. For example, The Social App Map defines four standard types of reporting including:

• Analytics: Monitors performance of social profiles and analyzes social performance of competitors, aspirational brands or keywords; these features also analyze the demographics of mentions and sentiment of mentions.


• Social Performance Reporting: Analyzes social performance of published content (not ads).


• Ad Reporting: Analyzes social performance of ads.


• In-App Activity Reporting (for social communities / internal networks): Analyzes activities of app users.

However, in addition to these standard features, I also discovered in my research that these capabilities can vary greatly depending on the application. Additionally, these reports can be coupled with workflow automation to prompt certain actions. Real-time alerts, for example, will automatically notify a social media manager if there are spikes in activity, new trending stories and there are key conversations among influencers happening in real time.

These are just a few tips your team can use to start navigating the social software space. Join the conversation with a comment here, and let me know what you think of the Social App Map!

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