Executive Summary
About This Constellation ShortList
Welcome to the age of AI, which feels more like a warning for social media leaders battling two opposites of opportunity. On the one side sits a massive opportunity for engagement, influencers, user generated content, personalization, and rich data ingestion thanks to social channels. On the other is a wild west of deepfakes, misinformation, exploitation, influence hacks, brain rot and doomscrolling into rabbit holes that threaten to leach users away from authentic brand connection and engagement. These social trends, both positive and negative, have thrust social media engagement platforms and their capability to be central to brand engagement as well as brand security back into review.
Brands expect more from Social Engagement Platforms. Social engagement solutions must accommodate everything from social engagement monitoring (the capability to capture and aggregate conversations and mentions while delivering insights into tone, sentiment and degree of influence) and social listening (the capability to hear and home in on the voice of the customer, be it an individual or a segment, market or industry) to social operations (the capacity to schedule posts, manage advertising and dive deep into engagement and performance analytics.) Solutions are expected to have proactive and reactive engagement capabilities, analytics and AI empowered workflows. Increasingly, these social platforms are at the core of a brand’s customer insight platform that intentionally captures, analyzes and acts upon a broad swath of customer voice and sentiment data. For leading edge organizations, these social platforms and intelligence tools are core to a larger brand security stack that embraces agentic brand intelligence and monitoring.
Social analytics, social commerce and social service capabilities are absolute requirements as is the ability to capture, analyze and deliver customer insights and social intelligence. Buyers expect out-of-the-box integrations with core marketing and customer experience solutions, including customer relationship management (CRM), customer service or support, customer data platforms (CDP) and marketing automation solutions as a real-time reflection of a customer. Organizations have also become aware that customers engage across social channels for a growing list of reasons from entertainment and advocacy to issue resolution and customer service. This has pushed organizations to look for more flexible social platforms that can address a more comprehensive and holistic list of experience needs that satisfy marketing, sales and service demands.
Threshold Criteria
Constellation considers the following key criteria for these solutions:
- Plan, publish, schedule and manage flow of social media content
- Monitor and have capacity to help respond to inquiries and content
- Capacity to manage multiple accounts across global social platforms
- Tools to upload, iterate and manage creative assets for posts and advertising placements
- Buying, serving and monitoring advertising placements on more than one platform
- Acquire real-time social/digital insights from multiple signal sources
- Provide data management, data acquisition, export, archiving and API integration
- Deliver data analysis and visualization, media statistics, sentiment analysis, influencer profiling and analysis, with AI powered tools to proactively identify potential brand advocates
- Advertising tools and support including audience segmentation tools and analysis, audience segmentation, inflight optimization and measurement
- Allow for cross-team and cross-functional collaboration, approval and optimized workflow
- Suggest next best action for engagement across advertising, marketing campaigns and enterprisewide customer journeys
- Support multiple languages and global engagement channels
- Integrate into a customer relationship management or customer experience systems
- Connectors to customer data platforms and engagement systems of record
- Apply ML and AI techniques for pattern recognition, topic and market identification, audience segmentation and recommended actions, content aggregation, smart assignments and automated response
- GenerativeAI tools and analytics to create optimized content including headlines, creative assets and in leading edge use cases, video
- Autonomous AI-driven workflows to proactively monitor brands, markets, individuals and keyword trends including curating recommendations for brand actions or reactions
The Constellation ShortList
Constellation evaluates over 50 solutions categorized in this market. This Constellation ShortList is determined by client inquiries, partner conversations, customer references, vendor selection projects, market share and internal research.
- AGORAPULSE
- BRANDWATCH
- HOOTSUITE
- LOOMLY
- SEMRUSH
- SPRINKLR
- SPROUT
- STATUSBREW
- ZOHO SOCIAL
Frequency of Evaluation
Each Constellation ShortList is updated at least once per year. Updates may occur after six months if deemed necessary.
Evaluation Services
Constellation clients can work with the analyst and research team to conduct a more thorough discussion of this Constellation ShortList. Constellation can also provide guidance in vendor selection and contract negotiation.