Social is increasingly a crucial part of the marketing mix. Forrester reports that social media spending in the U.S. is expected to grow from $4.8 billion in 2013 to $12.6 billion in 2018. In addition, 58% of marketers say they plan to increase their social marketing budget, according to the ExactTarget 2014 State of Marketing report. 

The state of social marketing is evolving and maturing and the needs are getting more sophisticated as social moves into becoming a mainstream function across the enterprise and brands address the following challenges:

• How do I manage content and data in so many solutions?
• How do I create quality content?
• How do I scale to manage engagement?
• How do manage social within a global organization?

Marketing Collaboration

As social matures, social teams are getting more and more distributed, and marketers need to be able to collaborate and work together effectively. They are using offline or disconnected tools that are inefficient, prone to error, and perpetuate information silos.

As a result, companies are not executing an optimized, coordinated social content marketing strategy – which means at best they are missing opportunities to drive awareness, and at worst they are confusing customers and hurting their brand.

And since engagement is highly manual, they are not optimizing the experience once the audience does interact with them. The new Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio helps marketers build 1:1 relationships that grow value for both the brand and the consumer. The platform is available on any device, so customers can run social marketing from their phone, tablet, or desktop.

Open Platform

Being an open platform is more than just having some custom integrations. Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio is a true open development platform with an API and SDK. Any partner, customer, or developer can build and deploy an app in our eco-system today. We encourage people to get in touch and we’ll show you how.

For launch, we’ve brought together seven of the industry’s leading vendors—Getty Images, Nexgate, Shutterstock, Rallyverse, TrendSpottr, Kontera, Pressly, and ShopIgniter—for visual content and compliance, content discovery/inspiration, and performance marketing. These are the use cases customers care about, and we are an open platform, bringing on these partners to deliver even more value to customers.

Social Advertising

The best social and content marketing strategies are amplified with paid media. What’s really amazing is that you can run a social content and engagement (earned) campaign in Social Studio, and then leverage Social.com for paid advertising to identify and amplify the top performing content from your campaign. Your top performing content is automatically suggested for paid campaigns within Social.com.

Learn more about the Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio by watching the video below and by clicking here.

A version of this post originally appeared on the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud blog authored by Marcel LeBrun.

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