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10 October 2015 | beautystorebusiness.com Gokhan Erkavun, managing partner at Beauty Bridge, says his firm also uses a dashboard, but always keeps staff actively involved in the social-media campaigns that the dashboards help to monitor. Essentially, such campaigns "need to be monitored" by humans in the event of last-minute changes in the social media landscape, Erkavun says. Fortunately, beauty stores looking for their own social-media dashboards— or looking to replace the ones they're currently using—can glean significant insights on the tools from market research firm Forrester Research (forrester.com). It conducted a rigorous study of the top social-media dashboards earlier this year and has come up with a list of what it considers the strongest leaders. FORRESTER'S FINDINGS Overall, social-media dashboards "make it easier for marketers to manage dozens of social employees and accounts," says Nate Elliot, lead author of the Forrester repor t on social-media dashboards, "Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2015 (forrester.com/The+Forrester+Wave+So cial+Relationship+Platforms+Q2+2015/ fulltext/-/E-res120645). "Nearly every mar- keter we surveyed agreed that [social- media dashboards] save them time." No one tool does it all. But beauty stores looking for a single solution that will handle virtually ever aspect of their social-media needs should consider pack- ages Forrester considers to be the Top 3: Percolate (percolate.com), Sprinklr (sprinklr. com) and Spredfast (spredfast.com). While Forrester stresses that none of these dashboards can be considered per- fect, most do go a long way towards pulling together and managing virtually all the elements of a highly effective and highly interactive social-media presence. Specifically, most of the products Forrester puts at the front-of-the-pack automate the scheduling and posting of text and multimedia across a wide array of social- media networks. Most enable a beauty store to monitor how its brand is faring on social media—both among casual users of Facebook and other networks, as well as more engaged influencers, like bloggers. Moreover, those in the Top 3 are also best at helping beauty stores greatly automate the processing of social media—including reading, analyzing and sorting out who at the beauty store should respond to a specific post. These "social relationship platforms" help beauty stores manage all their social accounts, as well as all the employees permitted to post to those accounts. And most of the solutions can assign different permission levels to differ- ent employees, and offer workflow tools for routing inbound posts to the right teams. Plus, the top dashboards can also ensure that select—or even all—outbound posts are reviewed by appropriate staff. Your lawyer may want a gander at some posts before they go live, for example, while your director may want to fine-tune others. THE TOP 3 PROS AND CONS All told, Forrester evaluated social-media dashboards using a 41-point checklist. It also surveyed each vendor about its product and asked for product demos. Here's how the Top 3 programs stack up, according to Forrester. Percolate: This package is a best bet for users looking to integrate their social marketing into much broader marketing strategies, Elliot says. The drive behind Percolate was to "build a marketing system of record that lets clients centralize their operations across all marketing channels, streamline their workflows and governance, analyze their results and optimize their marketing programs," Elliot says. He also says the platform boasts best- in-class workflow and content creation tools. Plus, Percolate has a rather nifty "Brew" tool, which tracks custom-defined lists of media outlets and influencers who beauty stores are monitoring, looks for topics related to a beauty store's marketing themes and then prioritizes the specific topics on which the beauty store should publish. On the downside? "Percolate does have room to improve its current offering," Elliot says. "Its analysis, prioritization and routing of inbound posts can't compete with what the other leaders offer: the tool monitors only Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It can't analyze for senti- ment and, at the time of evaluation, it couldn't route posts automatically. The product tells marketers when posts have performed best in the past, but offers no scheduling recommendations. And its global capabilities are underdeveloped for a vendor with such grand ambitions." Spredfast: This package is best at offering users' insights and advice as they work on a social-media marketing campaign, Elliot says. It tracks comments and questions that pop up from the cus- tomers and others a beauty store is trying to engage on social media. Moreover, as social-media marketers use the package, "it recommends popular hashtags related to their content and suggests alterna- tive wording that might generate more interest," Elliot says. "Clients love Spred- fast's onboarding and support and like the fact that it partners with other leading social vendors—such as Brandwatch and Kenshoo—rather than trying to build an end-to-end social suite." On the downside, Spredfast makes it tough for a team of social-media marketers to collaborate and share ideas via the package, Elliot says. "And not only do clients think Spredfast's own measurement tools are merely average—the vendor does little to help marketers share their social data into third-party measurement tools," Elliot says. Sprinklr: "Consider Sprinklr if you have broad social needs and global ambitions," Elliot says. "Sprinklr endeavors to offer clients every imaginable social tool, not just a full range of SRP features but also social command center displays, social ad buying functionality and more. And any- thing its standard SRP can't do, Sprinklr's team can custom build using the product's impressive rules engine." Especially strong with Sprinklr is the package's monitoring and publishing features. Elliot adds, "But Social-media dashboards "make it easier for marketers to manage dozens of social employees and accounts."