Salesforce Social Studio Reviews

Not only does social studio let you schedule from right inside the program, but it works seamlessly with scheduling from within the social apps also. You can use the program to keep things organized, but you can also use social apps without running into errors or issues.

When scheduling posts for Instagram, you cannot upload multiple photos - which you can do on the app.

If you do not prefer scheduling for Facebook through SS, you can still schedule through Facebook itself. The posts will still show up in SS, with the analytics. Same with any other social media post.

Planning and scheduling out content. Getting analytics for Twitter and Instagram - which in the apps they tend to not be available after a 7 day period (for weekly).

The one thing that Social Studio has done well for us is structuring a monitoring/engagement workflow. Custom macros, classifications, and assignments are very handy to ensure we respond quickly and accurately.

Where to begin....

-Lack of basic analytic functionalities: Unable to compare segments of social activity by custom tags. We are limited to pulling exports of our various GTMs/Campaigns/etc and then must manually separate them for side-by-side comparison. Many other competitors offer an intuitive analytics dashboard that allows for easy segmentation of data and comparison.

-Lack of cybersecurity: 2FA and SSO are both industry standards at this point - especially for vendors selling to Enterprise customers. We were unable to get any timetable on when these features would be added (Highly doubt SFDC lacks the resources to roll this out in real-time)

-It is clear that a social management/analytics offering was an afterthought for the larger SFDC picture. Support teams are not subject matter experts, responses are frequently re-routed and response times are long. These guys will make you wait for a response that simply disappoints and seems to dodge your question.

-Can't embed video into scheduled posts....seriously?

-Lack of an asset library

-Lack of many convenient and extremely practical features that other vendors offer (vendors that have Social written into their DNA, Sprout, Sprinklr)

Make sure you really dig into their analytics offerings. In my personal opinion, SFDC has fallen way short in this field. Vendors like Sprout not only offer practical segmentation for your social data, but they take input from their customers very seriously (unlike Social Studio). Find a vendor that will really try to understand your needs, and change alongside you. Not a vendor that says they want to understand your needs and then does nothing to realize that commitment.

We have formed a comprehensive workflow for engaging with flagged posts. If I see something of concern, I suggest a course of action, and assign that post to other relevant users for necessary approvals. Still lacks a function that allows us to easily email a flagged post of concern to a non-Social Studio user in our greater org.

I use Social Studio for scheduling Facebook, Twitter (two separate accounts), LinkedIn and Instagram posts for my organization. I like how easy the platform makes scheduling and monitoring posts. There have been times where I'll schedule a dozen tweets for one day and it's easy to drag, drop and reschedule them for another time that day, which is much easier than having to go back into each tweet and selecting a different post time.

Perhaps this is a complaint for Instagram and their posting policy, not Social Studio. All I know is that it's a real pain if you're trying to schedule an Instagram post through Social Studio. You can't really schedule an Instagram post via Social Studio; it's more like just saving your content and alerting you at the proper time. Then, you're required to go into Social Studio, basically verify that the Instagram account you're trying to post to belongs to you (which, by the way, make sure your IG app is currently on the correct profile if you have multiples or you'll have to close out and try again), hit "confirm", then it brings you to a screen with all the content (photo and caption) that you previously saved to verify, except there's no easy way to just verify and post it. I always get stuck on this step and end up having to copy/paste the text into a new IG post and delete the one I scheduled via Social Studio.

I'd say the ease of scheduling (minus for Instagram) is the biggest benefit.

Nice experience to approve and schedule posts. The look and feel of the platform is nice enough, although awkward when trying to access monitoring profiles that are somewhat hidden in architecture. Easy to access organic metrics although still doesn't include organic impressions which is a huge miss. Friendly support staff once you get a dedicated success rep. I like the approval process and task area and the notes function should have a better email alert for team working together in the system.

90 day timeframe for all data is frustrating. Lack of impressions for metrics. Cannot connect to social advertising activity and metrics. Given the run-around when trying to re-assess for annual contract and little to no communication and no consistency with their support team.

Not sure this is as sophisticated as some other platforms so if you have a very robust and varied social media program, this may not be the best solution.

Ability to schedule and approve social posts for all platforms and have a record of all social media activity for legal/compliance needs. Process improvements have resulted in saving time/resources for the business.

It has a hefty amount of tools at your disposal. They can vary all the way from social media management to outreach. Using it to manage Facebook and Instagram was easy enough but once you get into other social networks it can get better.

Our team did not like it and opted to go with marketo instead. Salesforce can be a bit tedious in its software updating and it’s pricing. It can be a little overwhelming because of how many features it has.

Give it time if you have it but don’t deploy it on a whim. It takes a bit to learn by once you do, you’ll get a better understanding on what to do and how to use it efficiently. Just give it time.

Benefits are better social media marketing management.

Social Studio is a great tool for organizations who are already deeply committed to the Salesforce enterprise and want something that easily works within that without paying for another tool. I would not recommend this tool for large organizations, but think it would be a solid next step from a Hootsuite or SproutSocial for a medium sized company.

Pretty much everything. Social Studio has a really small maximum file upload limit, doesn't allow posting videos to Instagram (which is really disappointing since Zuckerberg has stated that video is the new mobile) and doesn't allow you to edit posts once they have gone live within Social Studio.

This is a great tool as a next step for a medium sized company looking to upgrade from a Hootsuite or SproutSocial type program.

We used Social Studio for social media management, monitoring and analytics. The only real benefit is that if you're committed to staying within the Salesforce ecosystem, this (obviously) fits in. For example, if your Customer Care team is also using Salesforce, it's very easy to kick over any issues to them. Further, the Advertising Suite within Social Studio allows you to better align your paid media efforts with information collected in your CRM in a turn key manner.

I like the ease of posting to several different social media accounts, especially in a hurry.

It no longer allows me to tag other accounts easily on Twitter, which is largely why I don't use it much anymore.

It allows me to post quickly and on multiple platforms. When I need to get a message out quickly, I use Social Studio as opposed to going to each channel.

It does not matter which browser you or your company use, which is nice! Internet Explorer, Chrome, or Opera, all of them. This makes very easy to use Social media function like Chatter, which can help businesses find collaboration. Looking like popular social media makes it very familiar and easy to understand for users. Functionality like news viewing, status updates, links sharing, and files uploading is available right from the dashboard. You also do not have to install any software. There are no hardware requirements either.

It is very difficult to contact technical support of Salesforce in case of some questions. Sometimes it can take days to contact a responsible person. But it does not mean that you problem will be solved or your question will be answered right at the same time. Thus, many organizations prefer to work with third-party companies that take care of this Salesforce support which is a bad look on them. With such a big company I deserve better customer support

There is a huge range of report widgets that allow you analyze company`s performing from different perspectives with this software. Salesforce enables quick customization for the most business processes and for different industries. With this software you can bring your company with you wherever you are just because it is placed in the Cloud. Thus, I need fewer resources in the office to run business. This is the most convenient aspect of the software

Social listening in the engagement tab is very helpful for our team!

Bugs with scheduling Facebook/Instagram.

It's best for multiple accounts on Twitter and managing pages on Facebook. The columns in the Engagement tab are great, but you have to tell it EXACTLY what you want and anything that you might want to see.

It helps us know what people are saying about our brand even when they don't tag us. It's great for a team and managing multiple accounts. Re-purposing content that was posted the year before is a great benefit!

If you're used to other management platforms, you'll feel comfortable using Social Studio. It's pretty user friendly and doesn't take much to get up and running. I trained multiple groups of people with varying levels of technology experience and they all understood the platform quite quickly.

Being able to see the analytics within the analyze tab is GREAT! No longer do you need to go our to Radian6 for basic listening data.

Shared content is an email inbox life saver! It allows me to share photos, links, quotes, etc with many different users across our organization AND I get to see who used it and when, what site they posted it on, and what the engagement rate was with each shared post.

They're behind on functionality (as of 10/5/15 - still can't retweet with quote within the platform, can't see check ins, mentions, can't tag other Facebook pages or see a drop down of Twitter pages when you start typing their handle, or shares on Facebook, and can't connect LinkedIn University)

Don't trust the sentiment rating (although it's rumored this is going to be updated soon so you can train it). People tweet "I would kill to go to Pepperdine" and sentiment robot rates that as a negative. Or anything with the words "shot" (think how many tweets from sports teams have that included...) are all listed as negative. When/if they is updated to be trainable it will be a great tool. Right now, it's just a data set I don't look at.

I'm noticing as I complete this review, the Social Analytics Features portion of this review, Social Studio doesn't have those options available... yet.

When you're talking to Salesforce, ask for a conversation (or two) with current Social Studio users. I am more than happy to provide demos for Salesforce and I'm honest about what I like and don't like. Also remember, this product is VERY new to Salesforce and the marketing cloud in general is pretty new. That's a good and bad thing. Bad in that the product needs to be purchased on vision and the hope/knowledge they will be improving the product. It's a good thing because you're in on the ground floor of this soon to be HUGE social media player and can help influence the changes and product offerings. That's exciting.

We are able to listen much more effectively across multiple platforms. When monitoring a crisis, the word cloud gave us insight into what words we should also be monitoring that we hadn't thought of yet. It's an invaluable tool for keeping up with what is happening around the internet regarding our brand.

I like social studio because it helps me keep my clients and potential clients organized. I like the social analytics features that can be created for each client specific to their analytical needs.

I wish that there was a quick view to hover over contacts, instead of having to click into each profile.

I would recommend making a contact at Salesforce. They can help create a custom platform for our social needs specific to your company.

My company keeps all of the client contacts on Social Studio. We can easy view if other employees have the same contacts and can share contacts with each other easily. It is an organized and accessible software for social needs.

The user interface. Unlike the Engagement Console and Radian6 both on website and in the app, the overall feel of the UI is pretty good. It's also pretty attractive from a client's perspective.

There are still a lot of things that the Engagement Console can do that Social Studio still can't do well. If all of the features of EC will be transitioned to Social Studio in the next few releases, I'll be happy.

If you have a business size that is anywhere from medium to large and you are looking for an all-in-one tool when it comes to engagement and analytics, Social Studio is the way to go.

It is excellent in publishing as it has basic editing and publishing features that you cannot find in any other tool of its caliber. Engagement is also good as it can address trails of conversation with macros and tagging for social media reports easy to complete and manage.

In terms of analytics, both Social Studio on web and the app are both effective in giving quick results with topics that matter to you, when you need it the most. It can be your go-to tool for knowing whether your social media campaign is working in a couple of minutes, provided that you have an iOS ready device (iPhone,iPad)

Social Studio is primarily used by our company to schedule posts on our social media pages. I also train people to use and apply Social Studio for customer engagement and social media publishing.

The ability to see a calendar of the week and all of the posts you have already published or have scheduled to be published in the future. In addition, being able to easily reschedule posts just by dragging and dropping them is extremely useful, and new tools constantly seem to be introduced to make planning content an easier experience.

Random bugs will pop up from time to time and take months to be resolved. Also, the tracking tools that are included for monitoring posts on the various social networks aren't all that powerful, especially when it comes to analytics. We find the native tools within each social network to be easier to use and able to provide better and more in-depth information.

If your primary focus is in-depth analytics or monitoring what is being said about your company by users or tracking hashtags, there are probably more advanced products out there. If your main concern is an easy way to plan and schedule content, however, it doesn't get much better than Social Studio. It makes life much easier when it comes to scheduling posts across networks and being able to move things around within a content calendar.

More than anything, we're solving the issue of being able to plan content for social media out well ahead of time in a straightforward, easy-to-view dashboard. We also have the ability to collaborate and assign tasks, track analytics and monitor what users are saying.

Easy to use due to user-friendly commands and instructions/tips that are available.

Needs strong and fast internet connection to work smoothly. Crashing is, at times, often experienced. This is one of the hurdles all the groups encountered during our training in Nestle Business University which was held in 5-star hotel with good net connection. As soon as all the members of each of the 5 groups started logging in and testing radian6, this notice would start popping up "radian6 is not responding and need to recover page". If not this, page will crash and we ended up creating a new profile name for the group since the previous ones we did were not saved causing a lot of inefficiency on our end.

And lastly, uploading is delayed even if image size of the attachment is small. This causes discrepancies when needed reports have to be generated real-time.

Perhaps, a hard copy manual can be given since this can be shared to interested users as well.

Hi, Guys!

Prior to using Social Studio, I always thought that such tools can only be used by expert and trained digital marketing peeps who have undergone a separate study course. But after getting familiarised with Social Studio, I can now do my own monitoring and bench marking of my brands, activities, campaigns, etc. versus the industry, competitors, etc. This is definitely a huge held and a must-have for those out there who share the same dilemma as mine before.

So check this tool out and you will be surprised how easy your job can be from now on.

May the force be with you all!

Monitoring of brand campaigns and activities launched vis-a-vis competitors, and sales impact.

I like I can schedule out posts. so I can set up a week in advance. i see how this is very useful for a large company with multiple accounts.

a lot. I see where this is useful for a central office handling multiple pages and accounts. but for the single location it misses the fun and interactive nature of face book. sharing posts that give a more personal touch and customer interaction is lost. lets say I see something I want to share. I have to copy the link log into social studio, paste, and hope it interacts properly. sometimes the post shows up right other times just shows the link. I don't like that I cannon create event pages specific for my location, I don't like that I cannot change our banner picture. or our profile picture. face book is supposed to be organic and engaging our customers in a fun and personal way. instread I feel we are just another corperate page.

I just feel it does not have the organic nature that makes facebook fun and easy to use.

I used our account to answer customer questions. I use face book to notify our public of special events special screenings. guest speakers. I used it to create a fun movie conversation not just about our films but films in general. to engage our audience.

The clean and cohesive interface. Gone are the clunky dashboards that you had to build from scratch. Gone is the separate Engagement Console that you needed to download and pray your java supported. Social Studio integrates everything in one aesthetically pleasing in-browser package. Publishing, engagement, and social analytics now all share one cohesive URL and interface. It is easy to go from scheduling posts, engaging with consumers, to viewing topic trends and sentiment all without leaving a single URL. This is a massive step in the right direction for Salesforce's social tool. The engagement feature has gone from a hassle in the old Radian6 to something that is downright easy to use.

The current limited functionality. Currently the analytics dashboard is comprised of pre-built widgets that provide you with little to no customization options. You have widgets based on topic trends, word clouds, sentiment, top languages/countries, and keyword groups, but you can do little to nothing to customize them. The most glaring missing feature for me is the lack of drill-down filtering (like running a volume trend chart off of a single word in the word cloud). All the widgets are pretty much WYSIWYG, so it's essentially a dumbed-down, pre-built, prettier version of what you could create in the older Radian6 dashboards. Your ad execs may love how easy it is to glance at some graphs, but the data geeks like myself may be disappointed by the lack of features. The good news is, I have seen a preview of the Social Studio roadmap, and it looks like customization and drill-down features are on their way.

Publishing - Switch from Legacy R6

Engagement - Switch from Legacy R6

Analytics and Reporting - Hold off until customization upgrades are added

I often train business users on how to properly utilize both the Radian6 dashboards and the Radian6 Engagement Console. The problem has always been that two tool barely seem connected, and it was like training users on entirely separate systems. The new Social Studio will be much easier to train users on across the board, due to it's homogenized interface across the board. For our social analytics reporting we have had to continue to use the legacy Radian6 due to it's more customizable widgets, but once Social Studio catches up in that regard it will be an improvement in every way.

I like the easy to follow and dynamic feeds. The general design allows those who are not very familiar with such tools to easily catch on, and quickly become productive. The tools available are also numerous and with a surprising amount of depth. Social Studio truly makes the experience of reaching into the social world a much simpler concept; this means working as a team has never been easier.

The amount of time it takes for feeds to load, and the amount of times I've attempted to click one button and it does something completely different. In the social world, something as simple as liking a negative status can set off negative results like a fire-cracker. There is really zero room to have error when processing social interactions. This is fortunately not entirely that common, but it is disheartening.

Overall, small technical issues aside, the only true criticism I have is that it would benefit to expand the social analytic tools. Although they provide a lot of useful information, the ability to tie down some specific information is limited, and could use for some expansion.

Try it out! I haven't seen any tool make it as simple as Social Studio. That is to say, it works best when working hand in hand with other more in depth tools.

We are finally able to make Social Media a much more streamlined and measurable form of customer service. It can difficult to take social feedback from a customer and design a work flow behind that, especially day by day. Social Studio has been the best platform I have seen at providing a way to present this feedback in a manageable way, to then set up a standard on how to interact. Social Studio has also benefited us in providing a very visually appealing and easy to follow form of analytics.

It's easy to manage multiple social media restaurant pages at the same time, and to see all engagements, comments, posts, likes etc. The Social Studio team is also helpful when asked questions or when the team needs help. I also like that I can easily see content posted to both Facebook and Twitter in one place.

- Can't tag users or other pages in a Facebook posts. This is a major miss for a brand, specially when wanted to increase engagement on these channels.

- It's difficult to pull/understand metrics; I always need to reach out to the team for help. it isn't very user friendly.

- Post often fail to publish to social media pages. I always receive emails saying that our content has failed to publish but there is never any reasoning behind it as to why. Often when I attempt to re-post the content, it fails once again. This isn't reliable and a little worrisome when we have content schedule to go out over the weekend and it may not actually publish.

N/A

Customer service via social media (Twitter and Facebook) is one of the main way we use this platform. It's easy to see all posts in one place for hundreds of Facebook pages, as well as for different platforms. This helps us to respond to everyone in a timely manner and avoid missing any comments or questions that come through on these platforms.

To be able to monitor all the my social account in the same page/dashboard. Makes monitoring much easier as you do not need to switch between screens/tabs in order to monitor each account individually.

Lacks the feature for Engage section where you can review and approve messages done by others before they proceed to post. Current function does not allow this.

It's a good all in one tool to monitor, analyze and continually optimized all of your social media platforms/accounts in one place.

Looking for how much people are talking about my brands compared to my competitors and also social customer care. By comparing to competitors I can observe what the competitor is doing right or wrong and learn from that. For social customer care, it allows me to get consumers feedbacks/comments much faster especially when the comments made was not within my owned social platforms.

The ability to create case in Salesforce Service Cloud with the push of a button. Also, the ability to monitor multiple social channels simultaneously, in real time.

The functionality of publishing posts on Facebook is not as sophisticated or robust as publishing through the native Facebook platform, so I find that we are only using the Publish section for Twitter. Also, the mobile app does not seem to update as regularly as the desktop version, and there is a delay in the Twitter feed on the app. We have also been having an issue with our Facebook feed - the feed has not updated in over 3 days and we haven't been able to get a solution from the service team on how or when this will be fixed, making it impossible to send cases from Facebook (our highest volume platform) to the Service Cloud.

Make sure that you have the time and the IT resources necessary to get the integration with the Service Cloud up and running. It took some time, but was well worth it in the end.

The need to monitor our social platforms in real-time to engage with our customers and help solve their issues. It has dramatically decreased the time spent on creating cases in the service cloud.

We also have multiple brands which we need to constantly monitor, so this tool really helps us to monitor all brands simultaneously without needing to sign in and out of accounts to reply and engage with our customers.

1- Scalability & coverage: Social Studio is a world leading social tool. It totally address and scale social requirements for any worldwide enterprise (either you are in Russia, China or USA). To be precise, my company was able to deploy this tool on more than 30 countries on the majority of the languages, the social networks and with several SF.com consultants & partners covering the setup and trainings.

2- Capabilities: since 1 year, we can easily use social studio to listen a wide range of sources (it fits our needs and is aligned with competition, while Radian6 was too complex at its time). We also use Social Studio for social response & consumer care engagement. Finally, we leverage the social publishing part which is as well fitting our marketing needs.

3- Landscape and interface: Social Studio is only one part of salesforce.com. We leverage many other solutions from this vendor that can interconnect with Social Studio and add even more power and capabilities. Also, SF.com is for us one of the best to interface with other external capabilities that my company use (through webservices, API, etc.)

Social Studio cover all social scenarios but seems not the best in class in each of the capability (listening, response, publishing, etc.). It is one of the best solution for a worldwide business with general needs, but here are 2 examples: it will not fit specific detailed and complex listening scenarios ; and it will not cover ALL chinese social network for the response part ; etc.

We discovered competitors that can address specific cases better then, and we use them in some markets over the world.

- Make sure you specifically cover your listening requirements.

- Make sure Social Studio fit your very specific countries requirements (complex for China for e.g)

- My company is now able to easily deploy social listening & social consumer care capabilities over each country in a couple of weeks.

- We are detecting consumer crisis sooner than before

- We manage more social pages in more social networks; we need less people to manage more pages!

- We can target, translate and localize our posts in Facebook, in a same page for several countries and languages.

- We better track each consumer case

- We have adapted some of our products accordinng to what we see on the listening capability (flavor, packaging, etc.)

I like the purity and simplicity of the graphical interface of Social Studio. I also love the ability to have all conversations on brands and products in a single access point. Unfortunately in Italian detecting sentiment is not easy. Even the computing power and the speed of execution are really valuable and useful.

The platform is not easy to use at all. Even after attending the basic courses its use remains for me very mysterious and confused. Even with the use of relevant parameters the platform is also likely to produce a huge quantity of results, even inaccurate, that sometimes saturate all the capacity available.

Make sure you have studied the platform before its actual use. You may have problems: too many useless conversations to analyze and too much time required to analyze the volume of subimitted queries. Surely you have to do a very accurate initial segmentation.

Right now, for my position as web sales manager, I could not solve any problems. In fact, the output of your solution would be more useful to our social network managers, who will have charge of monitoring the conversations and sentiment, also associated with our products and offers.

Comprehensive feature set for Publish, Engage and Analyze with sophisticated design.

Users could easily understand how to publish, engage via Social Studio therefore businesses would be able to realize its value quickly.

System runs very stably.

No critical dislike point and I could recommend it with confidence.

Some features including the following list would be welcomed.

- Conversation history

- Approval workflow for engage

- Improvement in Topic Profile keyword settings.

Highly recommended. Once experienced you would be able to find that you could implement overall workflow for publish, engage, performance report quite easily with its feature set so focus on achieve your target with social media campaign.

Many aspects including social account management, team workflow and compliance.

One of values realized most quickly is reducing risks with social account management by deleting personal staff Facebook account from Facebook page managers.

Approval feature enables our customers to introduce content review process, which is required by internal rules, so they could start social media campaign.

Combining the magic of Radian 6 monitoring with a platform that has it (almost) all was genius. It encompasses all the needs of a brand into a single platform.

There have been a few issues where not everything pulls in, but I'm assuming that is a typical API problem. It is still better than 99.9% of the other platforms. In addition, there is no way to "Assign" an item of content to multiple people - only a single user. Analytic feeds are not completely export-able, only a select part of them.

Give it a try - there's not much that it doesn't do. Their connection with Radian 6 (same pulling system) is unmatchable for organic mentions. Listen to everything people are saying about your brand - not just the portion that they mention you in.

Not a direct brand - but overall is simplifies the process for us as well. Less need for multiple programs.

The ability to schedule posts on multiple platforms, the changes made have vastly improved this exerience from when it was first released and this aspect of the tool are great to use.

The engage console part is clunky and macros need to be much more easily accessible and replicate the engagement console. As is we are still using the engagement console, as social studio does not provide the ability to easily create macros, tag and view like the old engagement console does. A much better interface and workflow is needed.

Also sometimes the loading times are very slow for social studio.

No ability to schedule content on Instagram is a downfall, though I know the company are hard about releasing the API to do so.

Not being able to promote posts via scheduling through social studio is a real downfall for us and it means we cannot schedule any Facebook content from Social Studio that needs to be promoted.

While it still needs some improvements with its capabilities, it's a great tool to schedule Twitter content, and manager calendars.

We are trying to prevent crisis issues before they hit our pages by montioring keywords, as social studio is currently, it is not the best way to do this and we prefer the engagement console.

Scheduling content has been great as it takes the ease off our time ensuring posts have gone live.