The case for better social media technology in 2025

What is social media technology?

At its core, social media technology is software designed to manage a company’s social media profiles across multiple platforms. But as social media has evolved, management platforms have matured beyond this primary function, delivering much more to brands and the people behind them.

In fact, brands using dedicated social media management platforms see a clear impact on the bottom line. The 2024 Social Media Productivity Report found that 55% of social media marketers with these tools say their efforts significantly contribute to revenue—more than double the 23% of those without them.

From sophisticated data analysis to advanced customer care capabilities and influencer marketing tools, social teams and business leaders have come to rely on social media technology.

How social media technology has evolved

Over 5 billion people use social media worldwide, and 30% of users plan to increase their social media usage in 2025. From emerging networks to well-established platforms, audiences have a nearly insatiable appetite for social media content across channels. As a result, social media networks are constantly changing to keep up with the emerging preferences of their growing user base.

As networks innovate, social media technology has evolved in lockstep—ensuring practitioners can continue to show up where and how their audiences expect. According to the latest Sprout Social Index™, consumers say the top factors that make brands stand out on social are:

• Quality of their product or service (63%)
• Originality of their content (46%)
• How they engage with their followers (36%)
• How quickly they respond to customers (24%)

Social media technology has come a long way since its origin. In addition to its original function of helping teams schedule and cross-post content, it now plays a pivotal role in enhancing the customer experience, making it possible to respond to customers more efficiently and use performance metrics to inform content strategy.

Social media tools also:

• Establish operational efficiencies
• Enable teams to connect with audiences at scale
• Interpret performance data
• Help understand customers across every stage in the journey
• Integrate emerging tech like AI into team workflows
• Empower leaders with valuable market intelligence
• Prove social’s impact and value to the organization

There is no clear roadmap for how networks will change in the next five years. But social media technology ensures your brand is maximizing—not just managing—social, and developing at the lightning speed pace of the industry.

The role of social media technology at your organization

Social media is so much more than a push channel: It’s a direct portal to your customers.

According to Deloitte’s research from January 2024, “Social-first brands are repositioning social media at the core of the entire brand and customer experience, as a key driver of strategic priorities across the entire C-suite—from commerce and customer care to risk management, product development and beyond.”

With the right social media technology, you can streamline manual tasks and handle all your use cases, while also uncovering customer insights that matter to your entire company. Social media tools prepare your team to be at the forefront of the future.

Make time for more meaningful work with AI and automation

Without an effective management platform, executing a social strategy that encompasses publishing, reporting, customer care, influencer marketing and interpreting data is extremely complex. Teams without the right dedicated software are forced to perform tedious manual tasks while working in disparate tools, spreadsheets and email threads, costing teams and brands valuable time and resources (not to mention the high likelihood of manual error being introduced during reporting).

Thankfully, AI and automation are transforming how social teams work. The 2025 Index found that 97% of marketing leaders say it’s essential for marketers to know how to use AI in their work. Yet, many social teams still struggle with time-consuming, repetitive tasks that prevent them from focusing on high-impact, strategic initiatives. In fact, 63% of social marketers say manual work keeps them from driving real business results.

Automation helps eliminate these bottlenecks. The Social Media Productivity Report shows that marketers using dedicated social media management platforms—many of which incorporate AI-driven features—are nearly twice as likely to feel they have enough time to complete their work. These teams can shift their focus to more strategic efforts, such as influencer marketing, employee advocacy and customer care.

By integrating AI and automation into their workflows, brands can save time and improve efficiency. For example, by using Sprout Social, the Salesforce team saved 12,000 hours by automating simple tasks, and were able to spend more time forging and fortifying relationships with customers.

Enrich customer experiences

Social media technology enables you to provide an unforgettable customer experience and build long-lasting customer relationships—never missing a message or brand mention and offering the right level of support every step of the way.

Sprout consolidates all incoming messages into the Smart Inbox, enabling you to monitor conversations, respond quickly and prioritize urgent customer needs with AI-powered sentiment classification. With Enhance by AI Assist—powered by Sprout’s OpenAI integration—you can refine responses in the Smart Inbox by choosing from four different stylistic tones. And if a message requires a high-touch response, it can be converted into a Case and routed to the right customer service agent.

A 2025 commissioned Total Economic Impact™ study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that Sprout helped customer service specialists from a composite organization see 10% productivity gains using Smart Inbox features. The report explained that the streamlined Inbox improves the customer experience by creating faster response times and establishing brand credibility through reliable support on social.

Social tech collects data from customer exchanges, illuminating needs and pain points that you can use to improve your customer care interactions, while increasing loyalty and evangelism. This is critical for staying aligned to consumer expectations. Recent Index data shows consumers believe personalized customer service should be a company’s #1 priority in 2025.

For example, through Sprout’s integration with Salesforce, you can already empower your care team by layering social insights on customer profiles—providing a seamless experience for your customers (and making your customer support team’s work easier at the same time).

Centralize and share data-driven insights

Social’s role has expanded well beyond marketing, touching nearly every corner of a business. One of the top internal metrics social marketers use to gauge the success of their efforts is the number of teams using social data to inform their work, according to the Index.

A sophisticated platform unifies your social presences and your existing tech stack—aggregating data from many different sources and making it easily shareable outside of the marketing team. By integrating social data into “state of the business” reports, you can demonstrate a holistic view of your business results, gather consumer feedback to shape R&D product decisions and distribute key competitive research to help leadership combat market headwinds, uncertainty and doubt.

With Sprout’s Listening solution and Analytics tools, brands can keep a pulse on their performance, what competitors are saying, posting and doing, and identify trends across their industry. Sprout’s automated, presentation-ready reports eliminate time-consuming manual data collection, empowering social marketers to easily tell a compelling story about their brand and the market.

The Total Economic Impact™ of Sprout Social study found that using Sprout helped reduce time spent on social media reporting by 80%, resulting in $38,000 in savings over three years for the composite organization.

Help social teams drive more pipeline and revenue impact

The right social media management tool can draw a direct line between social efforts and revenue, empowering teams to refine their strategies for even greater impact.

At Sprout, we used multi-touch attribution to pinpoint which content drives pipeline revenue, uncovering the messaging pillars that move the needle. With this data, we’ve been able to prove the ROI of our top-performing content and key messaging initiatives—leading to increased budget for team growth, expanded influencer marketing efforts and even approval for Sprout’s first-ever brand activation at Design Miami 2024.

An up-front investment in social media technology can pave the way for future investments in your team. Connecting social efforts to pipeline revenue isn’t possible with native tools alone—it requires integrated solutions that seamlessly fit into your marketing tech stack, enabling you to paint a clear, accurate picture of how your team’s work drives revenue.

Why invest in social media technology

When social teams are equipped with the right solutions, they can bring more value to not only the marketing organization, but the entire company.

Investing in a social media management platform gives your business the tools to grow or maintain brand relevance. Social data is a source of truth that will help your company refine product development, strengthen your employer brand and recruit top talent—while directly driving revenue.

When you’re up against tight budgets and looming economic uncertainty, investing in social gives you a competitive advantage.

Pro tip: Not all social media management platforms are created equal

There are hundreds of platforms on the market today, but most lack the roadmap and commitment to meet a business’ long-term needs. For example, some platforms’ mergers and acquisitions have led to disparate offerings being haphazardly pieced together, resulting in a difficult user experience for sophisticated teams.

Alternatively, Sprout Social strategically acquired companies like Repustate and Influencer Marketing (formerly Tagger) to enhance our customers’ ability to drive deeper insights from social media and expand their brand presence. We never simply tack on or silo an acquired company. Instead, we thoughtfully weave them into the customer experience to ensure seamless delivery of service.

While others focus on short-term cost savings, Sprout is built to drive long-term success. With integrations like Salesforce, Tableau, Shopify and Zendesk, we break down silos, unite teams and provide actionable insights across your organization—from customer service to sales. Our platform connects data in real-time, empowering teams to make informed, data-driven decisions.

Sprout’s AI, powered by OpenAI and social data, delivers tailored insights that fuel strategy and streamline campaign management. With a focus on privacy and trust, we ensure your data is safeguarded, while continually innovating responsibly.

The platform you select should be easy to use and offer dedicated and reliable support, while maintaining a clear product vision and relationships with major networks. Your social media technology of choice should prioritize innovation without renovation and clunky re-training that costs your business time and money.

Without social media technology, your brand leaves revenue opportunities on the table

Social media is more critical to business success than ever before.

But without the right technology, social teams are overextended—leaving companies at risk of missing out on crucial insights. To truly tap into the power of social, you need a management platform that improves workflow efficiency, scales customer interactions and elevates audience data.

Request a personalized demo to see Sprout’s powerful data, flexible tools and intuitive user experience in action. We look forward to showing you how our platform can help you connect with your audience at scale and gather critical insights that propel your business forward.

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