Salesforce recently announced the end of its social media management tool, Social Studio. Customers will lose access on November 18, 2024 or upon contract expiration, whichever comes first.
Luckily, you won’t have to look far to find the best Social Studio alternative. Hootsuite does everything Social Studio does and more for a small fee. In addition, Hootsuite has free integration with Salesforce and a host of customer relationship management (CRM) tools to make the migration painless.
Keep reading to find out everything you need to know about discontinuing Salesforce Social Studio and what to do next.
What is Salesforce Social Studio?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio is a tool for managing, scheduling, and tracking social media posts across multiple social platforms.
Like Hootsuite, Social Studio allows you to plan and measure the effectiveness of both paid and organic social marketing campaigns. Social Studio supports posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.
Source: sales force
Social Studio is also built for social listening. It allows you to track mentions, keywords, and hashtags, as well as track conversations on social media platforms.
Hootsuite’s social listening tools offer the same brand monitoring capabilities and more to help you strategize for your business.
When does Social Studio close?
Salesforce will officially shut down Social Studio on November 18, 2024, but some users will lose access before then. If your contract expires before November 18, 2024, you will lose access as soon as your agreement expires.
Salesforce has already stopped selling product licenses. They also stopped updating and improving Social Studio. This means that you need to start looking for an alternative social media management tool right now. The sooner you can replace Social Studio, the sooner you can start ruining your social strategy.
Note. As part of the shutdown, Salesforce plans to remove all Social Studio customer data. We recommend uploading your data from Social Studio as soon as possible to make the migration easier.
Source: sales force
Hootsuite vs. Social Studio: feature comparison and pricing
Want to quickly and easily replace Social Studio with an all-in-one best social media control panel? Hootsuite offers all the most popular Salesforce Social Studio features and more.
Here is a brief overview of Salesforce Social Studio and Hootsuite.
Expenses
What’s Good About Ending Support for Salesforce Social Studio? You may save your organization some money. Social Studio plans start at $1,000/month and go up to $40,000/month for larger organizations.
In some plans, you will also have to pay extra for posting on social media. In addition, the basic Social Studio plan only allows you to connect two social media accounts. This means that if you want to post and analyze your performance on social media, the basic plan won’t fit your needs.
Hootsuite plans start at just $99 per month. Even our entry-level plan allows you to connect up to 10 social media accounts. In addition, all Hootsuite accounts allow you to post to social media at no additional cost.
Publishing
Not all Social Studio plans include standard publishing features. For its entry-level plan ($1,000/month), Salesforce charges an additional $500/month for posting. This plan doesn’t even include access to third-party integrations like stock photo apps or digital asset management systems. Hootsuite includes these features with every plan.
When it comes to publishing features, Hootsuite beats Social Studio by a mile. Use it to schedule posts to all of the same social media platforms as Social Studio and more. Post on popular social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google My Business, WhatsApp, Tumblr and more.
Like Social Studio, Hootsuite lets you view paid and regular social media posts in a calendar view. You can also see what your posts will look like on social media before you click “Post”.
If you need a social media publishing and analysis tool, Hootsuite offers a lot more options than Social Studio. Here is a short example of what we offer:
- Create compelling posts in seconds with Canva templates
- Create more compelling captions with Grammarly Pro for free
- Get integrations to post to Google My Business, Tumblr, and more.
- Find out the exact best time to post based on your audience
- Grab More Reach with AI Hashtag Generator
Analytics
Social media analytics in Hootsuite are more in-depth and customizable than in Social Studio. While Social Studio has some impressive social listening tools, they fall short in measuring the effectiveness of social media posts.
Social Studio makes it difficult to get and analyze the performance of a post. The platform also does not allow customization of social media performance reports.
Hootsuite analytics lets you view hundreds of metrics, see how you’re performing compared to your competitors, and monitor your team’s performance in the Hootsuite dashboard. When you’re ready to report your results, you can edit almost every aspect of your reports – select metrics, add logos, and customize visuals.
Here are a few more top features you’ll find in Hootsuite Analytics.
- Export, customize reports and add white labels in seconds
- Know exactly when to post based on your unique audience and purpose.
- Get an idea of how you are performing compared to your competitors
- View post after post and track hundreds of metrics in one place.
Inbox and Community Engagement
Turn conversations into sales with a more customer-focused inbox. Hootsuite allows you to manage and reply to social media posts and comments. Use it to reply to private messages and comments on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
While Social Studio lets you reply to posts on Facebook and Instagram, its features are limited. For example, it doesn’t let you reply to Instagram posts that are more than six days old. With Hootsuite, your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram conversations stay in your inbox for six weeks.
Here are some of the inbox features we have that help us beat Social Studio.
- Connect Salesforce, WhatsApp, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and more to your inboxes.
- Integrate chatbots to take care of messaging for you
- Satisfy and Improve Customers with Simple Customer Satisfaction Assessment (CSAT) Surveys
- Reply to private messages and public comments on social networks in one place.
- Reply to Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube mentions right from your dashboard.
- Use saved replies and automatic replies to save time replying to messages
social listening
Hootsuite offers more bang for your buck than Social Studio when it comes to listening to social media. Salesforce charges by the number of mentions per month, so the more mentions you want to track and the more popular your brand, the more you’ll pay. Hootsuite doesn’t limit tracking or charge extra for tracking more mentions.
Every Hootsuite plan comes with streams that allow you to track the hashtags, mentions, conversations, and actions of your competitors.
Want to go deeper? Get the Hootsuite Insights add-on. With Insights, you can track moods, emotions, mentions, demographics, and more. Easily track trends and delve into consumer research with advanced search options.
Protecting the interests of employees
Social Studio doesn’t offer an employee advocacy tool, while Hootsuite offers the best tool in the industry. Get involved and reach new heights with Hootsuite Amplify.
Create brand posts for your employees to share and send your message further. This will help you expand your brand reach while reducing risk and making it easier for your team to communicate company news, wins, and more.
Agreement
If you’re in an industry with strict social media compliance regulations (or just want to take extra care), Hootsuite can help. Like Social Studio, Hootsuite offers customizable access permissions and approvals to ensure content is seen by the right eyes before it’s published. Users can also create libraries of pre-approved content for compliance purposes.
Hootsuite has achieved Cyber Essentials compliance and is approved by the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). You can read more about how Hootsuite helps brands comply here.
Close Salesforce Social Studio FAQ
Is Salesforce Social Studio ending support?
Yes. In 2022, Salesforce announced the end of support for its Marketing Cloud Social Studio products. Social Studio users will lose access to their accounts on November 18, 2024. If your contract expires before then, you will lose access on the last day of the agreement.
What replaces Salesforce Social Studio?
As far as we know, Salesforce has no plans to replace Social Studio with another social media management tool. Instead, the company recommends using “third-party alternative products”such as Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is the best replacement for Social Studio. None of Salesforce Social Studio’s competitors offer the same community engagement, publishing, social listening, and analytics features as Hootsuite.
What does Salesforce Social Studio do?
Social Studio is Salesforce’s answer to social media marketing and listening tool. It allows you to create a social media calendar and schedule posts on the most widely used social media platforms. It also offers social monitoring tools that help users track mentions, hashtags, keywords, and conversations about their brand and industry.
How much does Salesforce Social Studio cost?
Note. Salesforce no longer sells licenses for Social Studio and it is currently not available for purchase.
Salesforce Social Studio pricing starts at $1,000/month and goes up to over $40,000/month. The most basic Social Studio plan also has an additional $500/month posting fee. There are four Social Studio plans with monthly fees starting at $1,000, $4,000, $12,000, and $40,000.
Salesforce sets its prices based on “monthly mentions”or how many mentions you want to track and analyze per month. They are also priced based on how many social media accounts you want to add. You’ll pay a premium for Social Studio if you want to connect more than two social media accounts.