Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business In today’s social and digital landscape, brands universally recognize that social media plays a critical role in their overall marketing and sales success. Thus, it’s more important than ever for companies to invest in the right platform to manage, measure, and analyze all of their social media marketing initiatives.
From publishing to reporting to community management, we’ve created a guide to help buyers find the perfect social media marketing solution for any combination of use cases.
The first section of this guide provides a list of important questions to ask in an RFP for social media management software. The following sections each correspond to a specific use case/solution (publishing, analytics, reporting, etc.) - these sections contain a checklist of the most commonly requested features by brands for each use-case. Table of Contents
Common RFP Questions for Social Media Software 1 Coverage and Channel Partnerships 4 Publishing 5 Content Planning and Strategy 7 Reporting, Analytics, and Benchmarks 8 Customer Care / Community Management 10 Influencer Marketing 12 AI and Automation 13 Enterprise Features: Governance, Oversight, and Security 14 Common RFP Questions for Social Media Management Software
Company and Contact Details:
Registered Name of Company:
Company Registration Number:
Address:
Year of Establishment:
Number of Full-time Employees /FTE:
General
1.) How are existing clients using your platform for [use case], and can you provide client case studies/success stories that quantify your solution’s effectiveness when it comes to said use case?
2.) Please list three of your largest customers in the [your industry] space based on volume of business. Can you provide references/testimonials from these customers?
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 1 Product Development and Roadmap
1.) What new capabilities, features, and functionalities are on your product roadmap for the upcoming year?
A.) What are some existing features of your platform that accommodate emerging use-cases in social media marketing?
B.) What features and capabilities are you developing to support emerging use cases (Influencer marketing, Instagram Reels, etc.)?
2.) How often do you provide updates/enhancements to your platform (few major updates or frequent smaller updates)?
A.) How do these updates impact the up-time/reliability of your platform?
Technology and Scalability
1.) What is your methodology for data collection by platform? (API, Crawlers, Scraping, etc.).
2.) What integrations are available between your platform and other commonly used digital marketing tools? (CRM platforms, web analytics, data visualization tools, etc.).
3.) What are the data scope limitations your platform has for each social media channel? (limitations on historical data, caps on API usage, etc.).
4.) Is your platform’s infrastructure single-tenant or multi-tenant?
Usability
1.) How long does it take end-users to onboard and become proficient at using your platform to organize, schedule, and publish cross-channel content?
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 2 2.) Provide product demos and customer testimonials that demonstrate your platform’s ease of use when it comes to [desired solution/use case].
Security, Reliability, and Data Privacy
1.) What recognized security standards, frameworks, and certifications does your platform adhere to (SOC II, ISO-27001, GDPR, etc.)?
2.) What are your uptime/availability statistics?
3.) Summarize your standard data processing agreement in terms of both the scope and purpose of collected data.
4.) Describe the scope of your ability to fulfill and comply with data portability requests.
Enterprise Differentiation and Customer Success
1.) What enterprise differentiating features do you support from the checklist on page 14?
2.) What percentage of your company’s revenue comes from enterprises with over 250 FTEs?
3.) Describe the scope of managed support you provide your enterprise customers (implementation, onboarding/training, consultations, day-to-day assistance, etc.).
4.) Describe in detail your technical support options and their availability (self-service, email, phone, knowledge base, etc.).
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 3 Coverage and Channel Partnerships
Your social media marketing solution should boast up-to-date coverage for every major social network, even if your organization only uses a few channels. Official partnerships with major social channels help prevent unexpected changes in platform functionality and help providers address business requirements effectively. In addition, strong vendor relationships with social media channels can sometimes mean early access to new offerings and features.
1.) Which social media channels are supported by your platform, segmented by functionality?
2.) Which social media channels does your platform boast official partnerships with?
Partnerships
Is Your Solution Partnered With…? Socialbakers Other
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 4 Publishing
The right publishing solution makes it effortless to schedule posts and deploy content strategies at scale, across disparate channels. The publishing solution you choose should feature an editorial calendar that provides visibility into all marketing initiatives across channels and business units, ensuring alignment across teams and preventing content sprawl. Look for a publishing tool that is easy to use and built from the ground up with collaboration and visibility in mind.
1.) Please describe in detail your platform’s cross-channel publishing capabilities and how these capabilities differentiate your solution from competitors
2.) What is your platform’s ability to target content to specific audiences based on each channel’s existing capabilities, first-party data, third-party data, and campaign data?
Publishing
Feature Socialbakers Other
Cross-Platform Publishing
Drag-and-Drop Calendar Interface
Dynamic Content Calendar
AI Content Performance Prediction
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 5 Publishing
Feature Socialbakers Other
Unified Content Feed
File Hosting Integrations / Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive
Bit.ly and Link Shortener Integration
Content Asset Libraries
Mobile Publishing
Customizable Content Approval Flows
Best Time to Post Scheduling
Branded Content Tagging
Evergreen Content Repurposing
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 6 Content Planning and Strategy
The best research and planning tools eliminate the guesswork when it comes to content ideation by providing teams with data-driven content recommendations and insights. The best content planning tools help teams identify engaging topics faster, and prevent teams from wasting time on content initiatives that won’t resonate with audiences.
1.) Please describe in detail the features of your platform that aid in content planning and strategy? (content inspiration and recommendations, content trend identification, etc.).
2.) What is your platform’s ability to target content to specific audiences based on each channel’s existing capabilities, first-party data, third-party data, and campaign data?
Feature Socialbakers Other
Unified Content Feed
Content Trends and Recommendations
Top Performing Content Insights / Industry, market, competition
Audience/Persona Targeting
Collaborative Content Planning / Team chat, mentions, notes
Persona-based Content Recommendations
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 7 Reporting, Analytics, and Benchmarks
Your social media analytics solution should provide the ability to easily contextualize, measure, and predict your performance on every social media channel via dashboards and reports that are easy to create and understand. Your solution should also provide robust benchmarking abilities so you can measure your performance in the context of your competition and industry.
1.) Please detail your platform’s reporting capabilities including supported metrics, dashboards, automations, customizations, historical visibility, and exporting abilities.
2.) How easy is it to develop weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports that provide metrics we can measure over time? To what degree can these recurring reports be automated/scheduled?
3.) What is your platform’s ability to integrate with other common analytics tools (Google Analytics, etc.)?
Reporting
Feature Socialbakers Other
Organic and Paid Reporting/Analytics
Customizable Performance Dashboards
Executive ROI Dashboards
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 8 Reporting
Feature Socialbakers Other
Flexible Widgets for Multi-platform Analysis
Google Analytics Integration
Data Visualization Integrations / Tableau, Google Data Studio
Scheduled Email Reporting
Multi-Format Exports for Organic and Paid Reports
Public Link Sharing for Reports/Dashboards
API Connectors
Analytics and Benchmarks
Feature Socialbakers Other
Organic and Paid Reporting/Analytics
Competitive Benchmarks
Industry, Paid Ad, and Video Performance Benchmarks
Automated Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment Dashboards and Reporting
Automated Content Labeling
Google Analytics Integration Other API Connectors
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 9 Customer Care/Community Management
Social media proves to be the most authentic and organic way for audiences to connect with brands. A good customer care solution should allow you to seamlessly and quickly generate positive customer interactions at scale, across all major social channels. A good customer care solution should centralize your care efforts across every platform in one place, and make it easy to quickly handle customer interactions and resolve customer issues.
1.) Please describe in detail your platform’s community management capabilities and how these capabilities differentiate your solution from competitors.
2.) What kind of automations do your solution offer that make community management workflows more scalable (response templates, automated case escalation, etc.)?
Customer Care/Community Management
Feature Socialbakers Other
Cross-Channel Community Management
Unified Inbox for All-Channel Messages
Hashtag and Keyword Monitoring
Answer Templates
Configurable Real Time Communication Feed
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 10 Customer Care/Community Management
Feature Socialbakers Other
Custom Filtering Options for Optimized Engagement
Bulk Actions
Agent Collision Detection
Agent Productivity Dashboards
Customizable Roles and Permissions
Internal Team Notes on Communication Threads
UGC Tracking and Filtering / Key Advocates Content
Notification and Communication Cues
Automated Sentiment Analysis
Campaign Tracking by Audience Sentiment
SalesForce Integration for Ticket Creation
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 11 Influencer Marketing
A strong influencer marketing platform should take the paralysis and guesswork out of influencer marketing and make the entire process of sourcing, monitoring, and analyzing influencer campaigns effortless and data-driven. In addition to simplifying and streamlining the process of working with influencers, look for a platform that also mitigates risk with features that detect influencer fraud and provide historical data/metrics for influencer profiles.
1.) Describe in detail the features offered by your platform that help brands: A.) source and vet influencers B.) measure and analyze influencer campaign performance
Feature Socialbakers Other
Database of 30+ Million Instagram and YouTube Influencers
Advanced Influencer Search Options / Reach, Demographics, Hashtags, Mentions
AI Driven Influencer Recommendations based on Marketing Personas
Influencer Score Assessing Engagement Metrics Other
Influencer Interests Ordered by Real Engagement
Performance Breakdowns for Vetting and Benchmarking
Influencer Profile Analytics
Fake Influencer Detection
Influencer Campaign Reporting/Dashboards
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 12 AI and Automation
You want your social media marketing solution to do more than organize and streamline existing workflows. A platform that truly takes your social media marketing to the next level will automate away manual tasks, and utilize AI to eliminate guesswork and make data-driven decisions and recommendations for you.
AI and Automation
Feature Socialbakers Other
NLP /Neuro-linguistic Programming Powered Sentiment Analysis
Image, Object, and Logo Recognition
Automated One-click Persona Mapping
Predictive Analytics Other /best time to post, reach, engagement, etc.
Automatic Content Labeling
Automated Case Escalation for Customer Care
Customer Care Score
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 13 Enterprise Features: Governance, Oversight, and Security
Your social media marketing platform should bring management into the fold with oversight on how operations, budgets, and results are running. This means support for robust access controls, workflow management, and approval creations. Strong security and privacy is a must, both in terms of platform architecture and internal governance.
1.) What recognized security standards, frameworks, and certifications does your platform adhere to?
2.) Describe the scope of your ability to fulfill and comply with data portability requests.
3.) Summarize your standard data processing agreement in terms of both the scope and purpose of collected data.
Security and Reliability
Feature Socialbakers Other
GDPR Compliance
CCPA Compliance
ISO-27001 Security Certification
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 14 Security and Reliability
Feature Socialbakers Other
Official Partnerships with Social Media Platforms
Single Sign-On /SSO
Multi Factor Authentication
Data Access with Secure Tokens and Connections
Governance and Oversight
Feature Socialbakers Other
Fully Customizable User Roles
Fully Customizable Access Permissions
Customizable Content Approval Workflows
Single Sign-On /SSO
Multi Factor Authentication
Localization Preferences
Individual Agent reporting
Executive ROI Dashboards
Choosing the Right Social Media Marketing Solution For Your Business 15 Drive growth by understanding your audience, creating content they love, analyzing engagement
and improving cross-channel care.
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