In the social media space, there is a plethora of tools all promising, in one way or another, to deliver value to an organization’s social media iniatives. These tools will do this via analytics and reporting, listening and brand management, scheduling and moderation, and publishing. How do you know what you need and how do you determine what’s right for your business?

It’s daunting, time-consuming and ultimately wasteful to simply watch demos and assess every single vendor that reaches out to you. These tools should help you with your social media programs – so the first step in vendor selection begins with asking a series of questions.

• What are your goals and strategies for social? If you do not have these, you should not be considering vendors
• What do you need to learn from your strategies and tactics to determine success? KPIs such as engagement, awareness and advocacy, competitive assessments and research, etc.
• What do you need to rollout your program? Content, permissions, reporting, ongoing research/brand listening

While the features and functions of the tools for social media DO overlap, there are clear specializations – and assigning priority to your answers to the above questions will guide you in the right direction.

Here are, based on my experience in vendor assessment and selection for social, the four main specializations of the tools, and some of the companies that do it well.

• Listening and Brand Management – Crimson Hexagon, Radian6 (now owned by Salesforce), Visible Technologies, Sysomos.
• These tools focus on scanning social media sites around key words and terms to provide you with sentiment, share of voice, volume of mentions, etc.
• Reporting and Analytics – Simply Measured
• All of the vendors have a reporting feature, but if you want beautiful, meaningful social media reports without so much manual labor, Simply Measured is the best I’ve seen.
• Community Management/Dashboard – Hootsuite, CoTweet, Spredfast, SproutSocial
• These tools allow you to easily schedule and publish posts to a variety of social channels, assign tasks to team members, moderate posts and comments and then run reports on metrics such as clicks, engagement, popular posts, etc.
• Publishing – Buddy Media, Vitrue, Context Optional, Wildfire
• Custom tabs and modules are the main focus of these tools, although with Facebook Timeline and the diminishment of tabs they’ve had to adapt and many offer great services for community management and reporting as well.

There are so many more social media tools out there and, to be fair, many of these are top-of-the-line products made for brands with huge budgets. There ARE tools out there that cost less and are targeted more to smaller/medium-sized brands, but you’ll need to do some research and probably speak to the vendors directly for prices.

However, the same thinking applies – focus on the specializations of these tools and tie it back to your social media goals so that you don’t burn precious resources watching demos trying to sell you features that aren’t suited to your actual needs.