Social Media Management System

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

A social media management system (SMSS) is a system you can use to manage interactions with customers and monitor the different types of social media conversations you’re having. They can pull in information from across your social platforms and help you manage your content.

They are important because:

• Leverage workflows. You can leverage the workflows that are already built into them.
• Security. They help you use the different platforms in a secure way.
• Automation. There is a lot of automation built into these tools, which you can benefit from.
• Analytics. You can make use of the analytics and dashboards that are available with these tools.

All-in-one SMSS

An all-in-one social media management system (SMSS) is a solution designed to meet the needs of all social media functions including marketing, engagement, customer service, listening, and PR.

The benefits of an all-in-one system are:

• Single vendor source
• Basic cross-function collaboration capabilities
• Lower total cost of ownership

Best-of-breed solution

A best-of-breed solution is a solution purpose-built for a specific social media function. For example, analytics: there might be a specific tool that gives you analytics off the back of your social media; there might be a tool that just does monitoring. Hootsuite is a very popular tool, which focuses extensively on social media monitoring.

The three benefits of a best-of-breed solution are:

• Domain expertise
• Richer functionality and analytics capabilities
• Development priorities aligned with evolving requirements of the space

Automated content distribution (ACD)

Automated content distribution (ACD) is a rules-based programmatic routing of content to users and user groups. This is typically a way of getting content out to customers quickly, across lots of channels. It allows you to publish content much faster to a broad audience and really save a lot of time internally.

ACD can be beneficial because it:

• Expedites the service operation
• Reduces agent collisions
• Prevents preferential selection of content

Core requirements of contact center SMMS

The core requirements of a contact center SMMS are:

• Features for viewing and managing customer profiles. These enable tailored responses whereby agents can provide relevant responses.
• Features for searching social networks for relevant conversations and service issues. These enable you to search how prevalent issues are and other resolutions.
• Agent response moderation and approval workflows. One platform for moderating and approving responses means there is likely to be an increase in efficiency.
• Message grouping and conversation threading capabilities. This provides a consistent customer service process that makes it easier for both the customer and agents.
• Conversation history retention and ease of access. This enables the company to analyze prevalent issues and how to avoid them.
• Overall ease of use. This provides one base for social customer service, allowing easier issue resolution and collaboration.

ISO/IEC 27001

It is important to leverage internal IT expertise to evaluate the security capabilities of an SMMS. ISO/IEC 27001 is the best-known standard for providing requirements for an information security management system, as it provides a systematic approach to managing sensitive company information so that it remains secure.

Security

Make sure that key features are embedded into the SMMS from a security perspective, such as:

• Data encryption in-transit and at-rest
• Configurable password policy
• Automated logout
• Granular permissions and restricting system access
• Full audit trail

They all form a key part of best practice to prevent the risk of ‘data leakage,’ which is the unauthorized transfer of classified information outside of the organization. Data leakage has been identified as posing the greatest IT risks for SMEs (followed by cyber attacks).

Modes of analytics

There are different types of analytics that you can get out of a SMMS. This is something you’re going to want to work with your IT department on, but primarily you want to make sure that you can get:

• Historical real-time data. SMMS platforms allow real-time data to be presented and analyzed relating to previous events that have occurred as they happen.
• Data export. This enables data to be extracted from the platform and used elsewhere in order to conduct further analysis.
• Custom reports. The platform enables the creation of bespoke reports to suit the client need.
• API. If you have an API built in, you can take the data from your social media management system and use it in other platforms. So, make sure there’s API built into it.