Salesforce has announced that it’s sunsetting Marketing Cloud Social Studio, the company’s social media management platform. What does this mean for current Social Studio customers, and what steps should they take before the product finally reaches its end of life? This blog covers everything you need to know.
Table of Contents
What is Salesforce Social Studio?
What Are the Key Features of the Salesforce Social Studio?
How will the Salesforce Social Studio Sunset Work?
How To Prepare for the Salesforce Social Studio End-of-Life
What Is a Salesforce Social Studio Replacement/Alternative?
What is Salesforce Social Studio?
Salesforce Social Studio is a social media management and marketing platform developed by Salesforce, a leading customer relationship management (CRM) software company. Social Studio is designed to help businesses and organizations manage their social media presence, engage with their audience, and analyze social media data to make informed decisions.
In the early days of social media, when businesses were just waking up to this revolutionary new channel, a SaaS platform called Radian6 was one of the best-known tools for monitoring your brand mentions on social.
In 2011 Radian6 was acquired by the CRM company, Salesforce, which proceeded to integrate the platform into its own, eventually rebranding it as Salesforce Social Studio, and adding additional social media management features.
Thirteen years later, it appears we’ve now reached the Salesforce Social Studio end of life, as the company announced the product will be sunsetted in late 2024 and no new subscriptions to the platform will be sold.
What Are the Key Features of the Salesforce Social Studio?
- Social Media Publishing: Users can create and schedule posts for multiple social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. This helps businesses maintain a consistent online presence and reach their target audience at the most opportune times.
- Social Listening: Social Studio provides social listening tools to monitor conversations and mentions of your brand, products, or keywords on various social media channels. This allows businesses to stay informed about what people are saying about them and respond to customer inquiries and comments in real-time.
- Engagement and Collaboration: Social Studio enables teams to collaborate on social media management by assigning tasks and responses to team members. It also provides a unified inbox for managing social interactions, making it easier to engage with customers and followers.
- Analytics and Reporting: The platform offers analytics and reporting features that allow users to track key performance metrics, monitor and measure the success of their social media campaigns, and gather insights to make data-driven decisions.
- Customer Engagement: Social Studio helps organizations build and maintain relationships with customers through social media interactions, enabling personalized responses and customer support.
- Social Advertising: Users can manage and optimize social media advertising campaigns within the platform. Social Studio can help target specific audiences and track the performance of paid social media ads.
- Compliance and Governance: For regulated industries, Social Studio offers features for compliance and governance to ensure that social media activities adhere to industry standards and regulations.
With the Salesforce Social Studio sunset, all of these features will not be available anymore.
How will the Salesforce Social Studio Sunset Work?
The exact date of the Salesforce Social Studio retirement is November 18th, 2024, when the platform will be permanently closed down and no longer accessible to all users.
The company has stated that if customers’ licenses expire before November 18th, 2024, they will not be able to renew them, so for many users the Social Studio end of life will actually happen long before the exact sunset date.
For this reason, it’s important for current users to understand exactly when their license expires so that they can start planning for a Salesforce Social Studio replacement in good time, because you won’t be able to simply roll over your existing contract.
How To Prepare for the Salesforce Social Studio End-of-Life
Salesforce recommends that current users of the platform export all of their data at least 90 days before their contract expires. It’s important to keep backup copies of all your data following the Salesforce Social Studio retirement both for your own archives, and to be in compliance with any applicable local business regulations concerning record-keeping and data protection.
It’s unclear whether you’ll have any access to your historical data following the Salesforce Social Studio sunset, so exporting and securing your own copy is essential.
Of course, data backup is just one part of the problem. Most users will need to find an alternative to Salesforce Social Studio to handle their social listening and management activities.
What Is a Salesforce Social Studio Replacement/Alternative?
We recommend the Meltwater Suite as a replacement for Salesforce Social Studio for a number of reasons:
- Similar, But Better!
Meltwater’s social listening and social media management tools, Explore and Engage, can provide a direct replacement for all of the functionality of Social Studio, but in a much more modern and powerful solution that offers long-term stability. - Salesforce Integration
Meltwater integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, making it easy for you to deliver excellent social customer service through your existing CRM system. - AI-Enabled
Meltwater uses Large Language Model AI to streamline social media management by helping you create engaging content quickly, and to make sense of your analytics by generating natural language explanations of insights in your social data. - Built for Collaboration and Scalability
Meltwater is an enterprise-grade solution with workflows and customizable dashboards that make it easy for global teams to work together, while ensuring compliance with local regulations. - Meltwater Does More
As well as social listening and management, for PR, social media, consumer intelligence, and influencer marketing.
If you’re considering next steps following the Salesforce Studio end of life, we’d be happy to give you a demonstration of Meltwater and show you why it makes sense as the perfect replacement. Just get in touch for a demo:
