Only two years ago, the majority of software tools for the management of social media were able to support only one of Facebook, Twitter or similar social networks. They were also typically designed for only one functional area, such as content curation, moderation, listening or analytics.
However, business requirements were running ahead of vendors’ capabilities and international enterprises urgently wanted an integrated platform. A SaaS platform which could be used by teams of employees across different departments and countries and yet be coordinated centrally. The service also had to provide a broad range of functionality and work with the wide variety of social media networks used by different consumers around the world.
First Wave of M&A
As it became clear that large enterprises would need such comprehensive platforms, the leading, public technology vendors started buying companies to try to cover all the functionality required. Some notable examples include Google, which bought Wildfire; Oracle which bought Vitrue & BuddyMedia and SalesForce which bought listening platform, Radian6. And, as these big players already had sales & distribution channels established in the market, the commonly held view was that there was no more space for new competitors. How wrong this turned out to be!
The products acquired from different companies are often not well thought out as a single integrated platform, and it may take many years for companies like Oracle or SalesForce to produce truly unified and coherent products.
Analyst Coverage
We started working on communications activities a year ago with Falcon Social, the leading European vendor of a social media management platform. We immediately recognized the need businesses have for an integrated service even before the market analysts had acknowledged it.
Research houses like Forrester and Gartner started only recently to examine the enterprise’s need to efficiently expand their social capabilities. Forrester’s report on Social Relationship Platforms (SRPs), The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2013, featured 9 criteria by which it analyzed the value of some US vendors. Falcon Social met all 9 criteria making it one of the leading European providers with a global reach.
Market Predictions
Having seen how the market has evolved so far, we believe it will change even more in the next two years. We expect to see the evolution of the following aspects of the SRP marketplace:
· There will be more partnerships, mergers & acquisitions to provide a comprehensive, unified offering. We have seen the first wave of M&A, driven largely by the need to add social credibility to existing CRM suites. In the future, mergers will occur between vendors within the SRP market who do not have a complete offer. For example, Hootsuite announced a partnership with Brandwatch. Acquisitions will be driven by large public, technology vendors from outside the SRP market who want to enter the market with a truly integrated, market leading product.
· Enterprises will use social media more and more for sponsored content, such as promoted tweets and retargeted advertising on Twitter and ads & promoted posts on Facebook. SRPs will start to include the capability to spend & manage the social marketing budget. Companies will pay to promote their own and favorable user-generated content and the media will need to be planned, bought and published in real time, not on a weekly or monthly basis like more traditional online ads.
· SRPs will broaden their service even more to include the tracking of offline activities, in addition to the digital experience. They will start to incorporate data about the social media engagement created by offline marketing campaigns, such as TV, print or outdoor ads. Businesses will require access to a single dashboard that includes offline and online activities.
· User-generated content will take a leading role and will be used even more extensively on e-commerce sites. Reviews and syndicated reviews will become significantly more important, which entails a constant need for SRP services to manage the flow of curated, user generated content to other marketing channels – such as the e-commerce shop and traditional media.
We believe we have been able to predict the essential trends in the market so far and we are looking forward to seeing how our ideas will become reality in the next couple of years. We continue to help Falcon Social expand internationally. After a year in which they collected two awards, raised $8M of new equity finance and grew headcount from 13 to 93, we are confident they are heading in the right direction!
By Tania Vie, Founder and Director, Vie Carratt.