About This Constellation ShortList™

Misinformation, political agendas, transparency and questionable business practices have changed how consumers view social media channels, increasing the importance of how brands craft social strategies as individual platforms continue to shift. Brands expect more from the tools that help manage everything from engagement to social advertising, service and commerce, especially in an age of Generative AI where content cocreation with consumers can be both exciting and treacherous. Deep fakes, AI-generated “video” and manipulated brand assets have given rise to a new skepticism among a consumer audience that expects authentic engagement with brands like never before. Brand content must live side by side with user generated content and branded influencer experiences making “managing” conversations as chaotic as managing campaigns and content.

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.)

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 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

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
  • SPRINKLR SOCIAL
  • SPROUT SOCIAL
  • 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.

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