With the incorporation of social media in many parts of business, from sales to customer service to marketing and more, the social software market has also advanced to support various job functions. These systems provide a variety of capabilities, including social media monitoring, CRM, social advertising and collaboration.
As these applications are all called 'social business,' such a diverse product landscape can create a lot of confusion for buyers.
However, this situation also presents many benefits. First of all, social app vendors are working hard to deliver very advanced tools for understanding your audience and/or followers, helping you find opportunities you might not have been able to spot on your own or with more traditional methods.
Customers have already adapted to being serviced via social, and it’s the social software vendors who are enabling sales, customer service and marketing organizations to venture out where the customers are to create positive experiences for them.
Because of this 'race' to deliver the next best social app, there is fierce competition in the industry, and buyers are ultimately the beneficiaries of really targeted, revenue-driving products.
In order to help buyers conquer the confusing market and reap the benefits of a solution, social software research firm Software Advice recently released the Social App Map, a free, interactive guide designed to help users quickly identify which products perform what.
Their ultimate goal with the Social App Map is for Community Managers, Digital Marketers and other social media professionals to have the background needed to choose software that aligns with their overall social business strategy.
In choosing which applications would be included in the Social App Map, Software Advice analysts evaluated more than 120 products before selecting the top 70 solutions, which include vendors such as Nimble, Lithium, Conversocial and Janrain. The apps were chosen based on their capabilities in five categories: social media monitoring, social media management, social media marketing/advertising, social CRM and social communities business collaboration.
Using The Social App Map is simple. All you need to do is click 'filter' to apply the criteria from your 'wish list' and be matched up. Or, if you already have a particular vendor in mind, you can click their logo and view details such as pricing, unique features and target customer size.
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