Mergers, Acquisitions and Social Media Profiles

When companies merge or get acquired, even social media companies, the last thing on the mind of the M&A team is how the social media presences come together and serve the needs of the combined communities. That task falls to the social media teams of the merging companies. Depending where you are reading this, or where you first saw it, you may be experiencing the coming together of Radian6 and Buddy Media to form the Salesforce Marketing Cloud here on the social web.

If you want to know more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud, watch for announcements next week at Dreamforce, but for now, get excited about a platform that will allow customers to listen, engage, gain insight, publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs in one place.

But back to these combined social profiles. If you have been following Radian6, you know about all the helpful blog posts we write, the in-depth ebooks we publish and the customer stories we share. That will continue as the Marketing Cloud. As a follower of Buddy Media, the great data reports and industry insights will also continue. While we can’t guarantee we will have more posts about cats, you can be sure if it is a great social media story we will share it.

For the time being, both websites (radian6.com and buddymedia.com), and their associated blogs, will continue as they are today. Our social profiles, however, are merging, or have merged as we speak.

If you are looking for us on Facebook, we are Facebook.com/MarketingCloud. Fans of both pages have been migrated to this page. All the awesome things we have been sharing on both pages will continue to flow through this timeline. If for some reason you are not a fan of this page, please go ahead and like it.

We are also in the process of migrating all of our social profiles to the Marketing Cloud. So if you see an update on your favorite social platform from the Marketing Cloud, please pay attention. Because it is still us: Radian6 and Buddy Media. There are a lot of moving parts involved in merging two identities, and some things happened faster than we expected. But if you liked us before, we know you’ll like us even better now.

And since everything we do must provide some extra value and provide some takeaways, here are some to keep in mind if you need to migrate or merge your social profiles:

1. Start by doing an audit of all your social profiles.
2. Download (or copy and paste) any relevant content that you may need moving forward.
3. Download any available analytics reports as a historical backup.
4. Prepare any new artwork or copy for combined social profiles before initiating changes.
5. Give yourself a wide window of opportunity when the changeover will take place, as you may not be able to predict exactly when the switch is flipped.
6. Communicate what is going on to your community.
7. Take a deep breath, because if you continue to do the things you did to build your communities in the first place, your fans and followers will keep fanning and following you.

This post originally appeared on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud blog.