Over the past few months, the number of social media management platforms to choose from has exploded.  

In addition to early contenders like HootSuite and TweetDeck, there are dozens of new applications designed to help teams manage multiple social networking accounts and measure the ROI of their efforts.  

In this episode, you’ll find out which apps are the clear winners and what exactly makes them so much better.

White Horse emerging media manager Jamie Beckland (@jbeckland) the lead author of a report that ranks 10 social media management applications against each other in three categories, shares the inside scoop on the winners and explains which features marketers should be looking for when they evaluate enterprise class software applications for social media engagement.

White Horse calls them social media management platforms and ranks them for their ability to integrate with social networks, offer practical rules and permission-based team management and provide the best measurement capabilities.  If you’re business is social media communications, this is an episode you definitely don’t want to miss.

SHOW NOTES

01:18  Social media management platforms are web-based tools accessible via browser that let you manage your social networking engagement activities in a variety of popular and niche social networks in one, consolidated tool, gives teams a practical solution managing branded social networking accounts and provide integrated tracking and analysis of interactions that ensue.

03:11 Social media management platforms offer social media monitoring to varying degrees of success, but currently White Horse advises clients to keep social media monitoring activities separate in order to aggregate a more in depth perspective of who’s saying what where. While social media management platforms vendors claim robust monitoring, the solutions are not as comprehensive as those from vendors who specialize exclusively in social media monitoring.  When it comes to monitoring, social media management platforms are weakest at tracking conversations on the blogosphere and in online forums.

04: 46 Social media management platforms make it easy to publish to variety of social networks from one place, but they don’t capture and display all the social interaction that may ensue in the social network to which they’re published.  It’s a dynamic space and this is changing, but currently social media management platforms are better for talking that they are for listening.

05:44  The inability of social media management platforms to see and report back interactions that transpire inside native social networks is partly due to the capacity of the developers behind them, but also because Facebook may actually block some of that activity from being captured by third-party applications.  Jamie Beckland calls these “growing pains for social media and corporate marketers in general.”

06:44  Jamie likens the rapid pace of innovation in the social media management space as the “Cambrian period” where things are moving so quickly, with many new entrants promising to be all things to all people, and marketers need to be careful not to rely too heavily on social media management platforms at this early stage.  “You’re going to still need to use the native platform.  You want to be able to have an authentic conversation on Facebook, you need to understand what the rules of engagement are on Facebook,” says Jamie.  Having that first person experience in the native social network where the conversations occurs, rather than through a social media management platform, is critical.

07:35 Social media management platforms use two differ...