Salesforce Launches Social Studio as a combined Social and Content Solution

HootSuite has long been the name in social media marketing collaboration. Until now. Today, Salesforce.com announced it is launching the Radian6 + Buddy Media Social Studio (shortened to Social Studio in announcements online), a set of tools designed to benefit marketing departments in social media efforts.

Salesforce has been known for a long time as a CRM giant, and now they are moving into marketing and social spaces through the recent purchases of Pardot, ExactTarget, and BuddyMedia. By combining ExactTarget and BuddyMedia, they are creating their Social Studio.

Features of Salesforce Social Studio include:

• Customizable workspaces for teams
• Calendars to manage content
• Publishing to social networks
• Integrated engagement to monitor and respond to conversations
• Detailed analytics to maximize effectiveness of marketing efforts and track ROI

In addition to the customization and collaboration for marketing teams, Salesforce Social Studio is an all-in-one platform that helps fully integrate social media into marketing efforts.

The collaboration and organization of teams is especially helpful for organizations that have multiple brands. This allows marketing teams to stay organized and keep track of specific efforts made by individual brands, regardless of how many—or few—teams are working.

Another big draw of Salesforce Social Studio is the integration with third-party partners. It already works with Getty Images and Shutterstock, as well as some content discovery tools like Trendspottr and Rallyverse. The product also supports custom integrations, allowing organizations to add apps and features tailored to their specific industries. This provides additional customization, ensuring that marketing teams have all they need to strengthen customer relationships through social media.

Salesforce recognizes that marketing is no longer about counting hits on a page or clicks on an ad. Instead, the key is conversations with customers and prospective customers started and maintained through social media. From Facebook and Twitter to corporate blogs and e-newsletters, the goal of marketing is to put a personal face on the company. Social studio makes that easier and more effective for marketing teams.

This announcement comes on the heels of similar announcements from Adobe in March and Oracle just last week.

Despite the excellent features of the platform, the real challenge Salesforce Social Studio has now is to prove it can beat HootSuite, who is an established name in social marketing. So far, the only real competition for HootSuite has been big-name companies like Adobe, Oracle, and IBM, but Salesforce claims that Social Studio is unlike anything else available, both in features and in scale. Social Studio is built for businesses.

The platform is currently available and costs approximately $1500 a month to use.