1. Social Media Management
Software Checklist
Consumers today have more options than ever before about
the media and goods they consume and the services they
use. They also have options about the social networks and
digital channels where they connect with others and create
and consume content. Smart social brands are present across
these channels to listen and understand their consumer and to
deliver great social experiences that build lasting relationships.
Finding the right technology partner to aid brands in this
effort takes careful consideration. A Social Media Management
software provides deeper insights to help you understand
your audience. The tools you need to reach and grow your
audience. And the engagement capabilities you need to make
social customers your happiest customers.
We’ve developed the following checklist to help you clarify the
must-haves for social media management and make a more
informed choice.

2. YOUR CHECKLIST
1. One Software-Built For Scale
2. Smart Content Planning & Scheduling
3. Trend Tracking
4. Integrated Content Management
5. Smart Organic & Paid Publishing
6. Social Care Monitoring & Routing
7. Efficient Response Management
8. Compliance, Security, & Governance
9. Analytics & Reporting
10. Global Support, Education, and
Strategy Consulting
A complete social strategy
should also include integrating
social into activations on owned
or paid digital properties.
Learn how to create innovative
social experiences.

3. 1
Smart Content Planning & Scheduling
Successful social teams must constantly plan and deploy the most relevant content for different audiences
across any number of social channels. Look for a solution that can:
What to Look for in a Social Media
Management Software
One Software-Built For Scale
Whether you want to activate 10 contributors or 10,000, an ideal application will be able to scale across the
complexity of your business. The technology you choose must be able to scale across different organizational
needs for social-including global brand awareness, customer care, crisis management, and recruiting. Look
for a solution that can:
Create a social organization that matches your actual organization—including different brands, geographies,
departments, teams, and/or social use cases
Provide granular access controls allowing employees access to only the parts they need to get their job done
within the software or across social properties
Customize roles and responsibilities in addition to providing prepackaged options
Limit user-engagement capabilities to specific geographies or audience segments
Encourage adoption through simplified workspaces based on each user’s day-to-day responsibilities
Enable workspaces to be configured for a variety of specific social activities- such as customer care, content
creation, employee advocacy, or distributed social presences
Ensure that only approved content is published, thanks to automatic, multi-tiered content approval paths
Offer configurable workflows for content creation—including content stages (e.g., draft, pending review, etc…),
tiered approvals, notifications, and mobile editing
Handle inbound content more effectively, via multi-tiered escalation paths and clear status information
Schedule posts in advance across multiple accounts, channels, and dates
Recommend the best date(s) and time(s) for maximum reach and engagement
Categorize posts by development stages—draft, ready for approval, content needed, and pending publication
Display your organization’s global calendar to show what other brands, divisions, or regions have planned
Enhance strategic editorial planning with a vast database of known, potentially marketable events
Pinpoint the best opportunities with events ranked on brand preference, historical social performance with your
audience, and up-to-the-minute trends
Track events with alerts on the most-shared content, and predict how much social volume an event will produce

4. 2
Trend Tracking
It’s no longer enough to simply publish planned marketing messages and respond to fans and followers. To
drive engagement these days, social teams must stay alert to trends and use context to know when to join
the conversation. Look for a solution that can:
Integrated Content Management
The need to have well-organized and compelling brand content at your fingertips has never been greater.
The most effective teams create content collaboratively across multiple roles, departments, and even
geographies. Look for a solution that can:
Surface the top trending content from multiple social media sources
Track multiple social channels for trends on your own terms, phrases, hashtags, or locations
Visualize trending topics and content in live, real time dashboard
Identify and monitor influencers as they interact with your branded accounts and keywords
Monitor the key terms and topics trending within your own audience
Monitor competition and their audiences across trending topics and hashtags
Filter trends by location, terms, language, and followers
Create alerts for when branded terms begin trending
Store, manage, and rapidly deploy multiple content types through a highly visual interface
Provide easy access to standardized responses for common issues and questions
Bulk upload multiple sources of content at once
Embargo content so that it can only be used during a certain time period
Organize content into folders and campaigns
Enable permission-based access to certain content, campaigns, and folders
Search and discover content via filtered attributes
Customize assets with image editing and a library of templates optimized for each social network’s size
requirements

5. 3
Smart Organic & Paid Publishing
Effective content distribution requires staying on top of multiple media types and image formats,as well as
ever-changing audience expectations and consumption habits. Look for a solution that can:
Social Care Monitoring & Routing
Done right, social care drives loyalty and affinity—but it requires organization around extremely fast response
times as well as careful messaging. Look for a solution that can:
Target content to specific audiences on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+ by selecting attributes like
gender, education, age, location, job function, and seniority
Adjust planned content using a recommendation engine for best-performing words and words to avoid
Easily segment content via campaigns and content tags
Reach more of your audience with paid publishing options across a variety of channels
Coordinate paid-content workflows with dark/unpublished posts
Distribute content across multiple social channels, regions, or departments simultaneously
Automate link tagging through web-analytics integrations (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.)
Generate custom URLs via integrated link shorteners
Automatically categorize huge volumes of inbound content for maximum efficiency
Get the right content in front of the right people, using rules-based routing according to topic, influencer,
category, or sentiment
Triage inbound items for response, workflow, or action from other teams—whether desktop or mobile
Deliver instant and ongoing visibility into content sentiment
Track social for “crisis flags” around the brand, set alerts if they gain traction, and monitor the social lifespan
around a crisis
Rapidly spin up response teams with the appropriate approvals and permissions, so that the right people can
access information and make decisions quickly
Ensure efficiency with team and individual reporting on the service level agreements (SLAs) that matter to you
Report on various customer-care analytics including open rates, time to close, and issue tracking at team and
individual level

6. 4
Efficient Response Management
Context is everything when it comes to resolving an issue on social. To respond effectively, social teams must
be armed with historical data, consumer affinity, and response preferences across any channel. Look for a
solution that can:
Compliance, Security & Governance
Risk and cyber-security management are top of mind for many brands and media properties, especially those
in regulated industries. Look for a solution that can:
Enable multiple response actions across your Owned social accounts- including private messages and replies to
comments
Identify influencers contributing to social conversations, to help with response priority
Maintain a repository for pre-approved content and assets related to different potential crises
Provide an easily configured dashboard for rapid response and action
Enable deeper understanding of the issue with a view into conversation history
Provide public social information and context for help tailoring an authentic response
Hide or delete posts from social networks with easy spam identification and removal
Engage directly with third-party systems (e.g., care dashboards, external listening vendors)
Retain independent access to social activity without relying on social networks
Capture all inbound and outbound activity in a single system
Record engagement audit trails across team members and social channels
Store approval audit trails
Leverage data API for integrating social archive information with data warehouses
Automate daily exports via SFTP or SMTP
Provide a single, controllable user login to grant access across your branded social media accounts
Manage passwords including expiration dates and CAPTCHA
Encrypt data in transit and at rest
Restrict application access using whitelisted IP addresses and ranges
Support backup encryption using SSL and GnuPG
Enable Single Sign-On using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) 2

7. 5
Analytics & Reporting
Accurately measuring and reporting on social business value is mission-critical for most organizations, yet
most still struggle to get there. Look for a solution that can:
Global Support, Education & Strategy Consulting
Many vendors provide basic software training, but the partnership stops there. A true strategic partner will
guide and support you in attaining your social business goals. Look for a partner that can:
Integrate with existing web analytics tools to track conversions
Identify top content, contributors, engagement, activity, and time of day
Compare message and campaign performance across any and all social channels
Enable competitive comparisons of campaign performance and social activity
Report on Share of Voice to track the social footprint of any campaign, sponsorship, or crisis
Report on volume, reach, and sentiment
Analyze key account information to track fan growth, demographic trends, and impression data
Customize reports and dashboards to reflect the data that matters to your business
Provide visibility into audience demographics and composition on specific social channels
Aggregate engagement and account metrics across different social networks and owned social accounts
Offer visibility and context to all internal stakeholders, using custom dashboard displays that aggregate various
metrics (community, listening, real time marketing, experiences)
Provide complete software training, certification, and continuing education through onsite and online instructor-
led courses
Offer a dedicated customer-success team for ongoing advocacy and account planning, as well as best-practices
guidance and usage optimization
Tailor software configuration to meet your unique needs
Deliver 24/7 support, along with onsite event support as needed
Provide community management and moderation services for live events as well as ongoing social communities
Design and execute breakthrough social curation and other digital experiences for major events and campaigns
Provide consultative services on social strategy, customer care strategy, digital content strategy, and more

8. At Spredfast, our collective mission is to enable Smart Social to make every con-
sumer touch point better. We bring data and insights into content planning and
publishing, from knowing audience trends, influencers and advocates, to effec-
tively moderating and managing social at scale, to analyzing results. The Spredfast
Social Software Software is unique in its ability to manage, integrate, and amplify
social content across any digital touch point in real-time. Our passion for enabling
smart social also plays out in the way we partner with customers to inform their
social strategy.
Spredfast customers manage over one billion social connections across 84 coun-
tries and have the power to process 650 million pieces of social content per day
in multiple languages. Over 600 customers, including all five major broadcast net-
works and fifty percent of Interbrand’s 2013 World’s Best Brands have partnered
with Spredfast to create first-class social experiences.
To learn more about Conversations or request a demo, email info@spredfast.com.
Social Networks Supported
About the Spredfast Social Software
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