The 5 Classes of Social Media Marketing Vendors

The increase in the importance of social media channels for marketing has resulted in the emergence of a new breed of tools to help marketers manage and deliver programs across social networks. No definitive categorization of these tools has yet to emerge, although the broader segment is often referred to as social media marketing platforms (SMMPs) or social media management systems (SMMS). As always with nascent markets, the vendors of this new category use similar terminology and can appear to be offering similar capabilities. However when we look closely at the the vendors, the reality is they come at social media marketing from very different angles. Whilst there is some overlap and convergence in capabilities, broadly we can define 5 key classes of vendors.

The sharers – these are the email vendors attempting to make their platforms relevant for social media marketing. Typically their strategy revolves around making email content assets shareable within social networks, with analytics to support the tracking of the conversion process from this distribution. This class is the least sophisticated in social media marketing capability.

The listeners – the buzz monitoring vendors, whose heritage involves providing the listening and feedback loop to track brand reputation and sentiment. This class of vendors are typically weak when it comes to the fulfilment of marketing campaigns, but provide solid intelligence to support campaign decisions, rather than sophisticated functionality to execute the campaigns themselves.

The conversationalists – these tools are often designed for the social media manager, rather than the broader marketing department. They can be very useful for the aggregating of interactions and publishing of messages on multiple social media channels, but are more centered on managing the day-to-day conversation rather than the implementation, automation and measurement of marketing campaigns across social media.

The builders – this class of tools is focused on page building capability for Facebook Pages and often the curation and management of the wall posts. The single channel nature of this class limits their use for wider social media marketing efforts.

The campaigners – the group of social media vendors that are most focused on managing marketing campaigns through multiple social media channels. Often having templates for various types of campaigns to automate some of the processes and sophisticated tracking of goal metrics, this class of tools allows marketers to easily measure value from their social media marketing efforts.

You could say that social media management systems need to be all these things. And you would be right. That is why at EngageSciences, although our platform’s core tactical capability is enabling marketing campaigns across social media channels (‘the campaigners’), our strategic goal is to help marketers target the lifecycle of social media marketing – attracting customers, engaging followers and unleashing fans, to in turn attract more customers. We then focus on what we need from across the five classes to achieve that goal. Most importantly of all, we enable you to measure it against your campaign objectives.

9 Responses to The 5 Classes of Social Media Marketing Vendors

Distinctinspirations says: October 14, 2010 at 3:23 pm

Very interesting – I was actually thinking about that coming in to work today – How just 1 platform will never be enough for successful interaction with your targeted group – you have to go from every angle in confidence that your message will be heard. I look forward to following you conversation as it moves forward!

Reginald Jackson says: October 23, 2010 at 5:39 am

I like this article. I know that we all have our own class that we excel the most.

Pranam says: November 22, 2010 at 7:48 am

Interesting classification of the social media masses. It definitely gives more insight into which categoory to fit in to. Especially for the vendor to pitch to the client what he/she is required to. Though more often than not, vendors are expected to fit into every one of these classes including post campaign reports and analyze the exercise. nnI look forward to more on this topic and how each class can leverage their skill set to plan and accomplish more. More thoughts on this would be welcome.

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