# Buddy Media implementation cost: what social publishing costs after Social Studio

Buddy Media lived on inside Social Studio, which Salesforce retired on 18 November 2024. There is nothing to implement under that name, so this page prices what teams buy for social publishing now.

**Published:** 2026-01-09
**Canonical:** https://synconai.com/buddy-media-salesforce-implementation-cost
**Author:** SynconAI Architecture Team

## In short

There is no Buddy Media implementation to buy: its publishing tools became part of Social Studio, which Salesforce retired on 18 November 2024. Teams now buy a third-party publishing suite. Sprout Social, Salesforce's 2022 partner for Social Studio customers, lists plans from US$79 to US$399 per seat per month as at October 2026, plus a services project to connect it to Salesforce.

## Sources

- **Marketing Cloud Social Studio Retirement** (retrieved 2024-11-18)
  https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.mc_cc_faq_resolve_missing_data_in_social_care_display.htm&type=5
  > Salesforce retired the following Marketing Cloud Social Studio subscriptions (“Marketing Cloud Social Studio Products”) on November 18, 2024.
- **Sprout Social and Salesforce partnership** (retrieved 2024-10-09)
  https://sproutsocial.com/insights/sprout-salesforce-partnership/
  > We built a sophisticated logic layer that connects Salesforce to Sprout, which means your customer data can easily be passed and stored between both platforms.

## What to take away

- Social Studio retired on 18 November 2024, so a quote to implement Buddy Media or Social Studio is a quote for something Salesforce no longer sells.
- The replacement cost is a per-seat publishing subscription, such as Sprout Social at US$79 to US$399 per seat per month, plus a Salesforce integration project.
- Seat count, approval workflow depth and which plan carries the Salesforce connection drive the subscription; brand page count and governance drive the services.
- Price paid social separately: organic publishing, community management and ad audience activation are different budgets with different owners.

## The guide

Buddy Media was the tool large brands used to publish to Facebook pages, run branded page apps and manage social content across many accounts. After Salesforce bought it, its publishing and engagement features were folded into Marketing Cloud, and later into Social Studio alongside the listening tools that came from Radian6. Social Studio is now gone. Salesforce's retirement notice says it plainly: "Salesforce retired the following Marketing Cloud Social Studio subscriptions (“Marketing Cloud Social Studio Products”) on November 18, 2024."

That leaves a simple answer to the question in the title. There is no Buddy Media implementation to cost, because there is no product to implement. Anyone offering to implement Buddy Media or Social Studio in 2026 is either using an old name for something else or has not checked. The useful question is what a marketing team that still needs governed social publishing, with a link back to Salesforce, should buy and what that project costs. That is what the rest of this page prices.

## What Salesforce sells for social publishing today

Salesforce does not sell a social publishing product under its own name. The current Marketing Cloud pricing page covers Marketing Cloud Next editions, Account Engagement, loyalty, personalisation and intelligence products, and none of them is a social publishing calendar. When Social Studio was on its way out, Salesforce pointed customers to a partner instead. In March 2022 Salesforce and Sprout Social announced a global partnership aimed at Social Studio customers, and Sprout's own write-up describes the integration in practical terms: "We built a sophisticated logic layer that connects Salesforce to Sprout, which means your customer data can easily be passed and stored between both platforms."

Sprout is not the only option. Hootsuite, Emplifi, Khoros and others all publish to the same networks, and some have Salesforce connectors of their own. But Sprout is the one Salesforce named, so it is the fairest reference point for pricing.

## What the publishing subscription costs

Sprout Social publishes its prices. As at October 2026, its [pricing page](https://sproutsocial.com/pricing/) lists the following, in US dollars per seat per month.

| Sprout Social plan | Listed price (USD per seat per month) | Notes from the pricing page |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Essentials | $79 billed annually, $99 billed monthly | Entry plan |
| Standard | $199 | Premium add-ons available from this plan up |
| Professional | $299 | |
| Advanced | $399 | Lists the Sprout API and helpdesk integrations |
| Enterprise | Custom | Demo and quote required |

The seat is the unit that matters. A team of six publishers and two community managers on Professional is eight seats, or 8 times US$299 times 12, which comes to US$28,704 a year at list. Move the same team to Advanced and it is US$38,304. The difference is often decided by integration needs rather than publishing features, so confirm with the vendor which plan includes the Salesforce connection you need before you compare totals. The pricing page lists Salesforce among its integrations but does not, on its face, tie it to a single plan.

Large brands with many regions usually end up on Enterprise, which is quote-only. What sets that price is the number of seats, the number of connected social profiles, the premium add-ons you take, and the level of onboarding and support you buy from the vendor.

## What the implementation involves

A publishing suite is quick to switch on. What takes time is reproducing the governance a Buddy Media or Social Studio customer had built up over years, and connecting the new tool to Salesforce so social activity is not stranded. A comparable quote covers these work packages.

**Profile and brand inventory.** List every social profile, page and handle, who owns it, which brand or region it belongs to, and which ones should be retired rather than carried over. Enterprises that ran Buddy Media often have dozens of dormant pages created for campaigns. Connecting each live profile to the new tool needs an admin on that profile, which is a coordination job more than a technical one.

**Workspace and permission design.** Recreate the structure of brands, regions and teams in the new tool's groups and roles. Decide who can draft, who can approve and who can publish. Approval workflows are where publishing tools differ most, and where a regulated brand spends most of its configuration effort.

**Content calendar and asset library.** Decide what history to keep. Social Studio content and data were not something you could keep using after the retirement date, so any archive should already sit in your own storage. The new calendar usually starts fresh, with tags and campaign naming agreed before the first post goes out.

**Salesforce integration.** This is the part a Salesforce partner adds. Typical scope is matching social profiles to Contacts or Leads, creating Leads from social conversations in Sales Cloud, and passing performance data into reporting. Each object mapping needs a field design, an integration user and a decision about which system owns which field.

**Reporting.** Social Studio users often relied on its dashboards. Decide whether reporting lives in the publishing tool, in Marketing Cloud Intelligence, or in Tableau, and budget the build in one place, not three.

**Training and rollout.** Publishers learn a new tool in days, but approvers, legal reviewers and regional teams each need their own short path through it.

## What makes the project bigger or smaller

The number of brands and regions is the largest factor. One brand with five profiles is a small rollout. A consumer goods company with forty brands across twelve markets needs a workspace design, a permissions model and a regional training plan, and each of those is real effort.

Approval depth comes second. A brand where an intern posts and a manager glances at it needs very little. A bank, pharmaceutical company or government agency where every post needs legal review needs multi-step approval, audit history and probably an archiving arrangement for records retention.

Integration ambition is third. Logging social activity on the Contact is modest work. Building automated lead creation with assignment rules, deduplication and attribution back to campaigns is a proper integration project, and it should be tested like one.

The fourth factor is whether paid social is in scope. Many teams that grew up on Buddy Media expect their social tool to run ads too. Organic publishing, community management and paid campaign management are different jobs with different owners, and the costs should be separated so that one does not hide inside another. If paid audiences are the real need, look at how Salesforce prices audience activation through Data 360 rather than stretching a publishing tool to cover it. The Data 360 pricing page lists Ad Audience add-ons alongside its Enterprise Profiles option, which is quoted per thousand profiles per year.

## Decisions to settle before anyone prices the work

Most of the cost uncertainty in a publishing replacement comes from decisions nobody has made yet. Settling them before you ask for quotes makes the quotes shorter and more honest, because the bidder no longer has to pad for the unknown.

Decide who owns social. In some organisations it is brand marketing, in others corporate communications, and in others a digital team inside IT. The owner chooses the tool, holds the seat budget and signs off the permission model. When ownership is unclear, the project drifts into a committee and the configuration tries to satisfy everyone, which is slow and expensive.

Decide whether social customer care belongs in the same tool. Social Studio combined publishing, listening and care, so many former customers assume a single replacement must do all three. It need not. If customer questions arriving on social channels should become Cases in Service Cloud, that is a service design decision with its own routing, entitlements and agent training, and it is better priced as its own package. The publishing team should not inherit a contact centre problem because both used to live behind the same login.

Decide what Salesforce actually needs to know. A marketing operations lead will often ask for every like and comment to land in Salesforce. Very little of that is useful on a Contact record, and storing it has a cost in data volume and reporting noise. A short list, such as the social profile on the Contact, Leads created from qualified conversations, and campaign-level performance, is usually enough. Each item you drop removes integration build and testing from the quote.

Decide how long the old way of working can run in parallel. If Social Studio was replaced by spreadsheets and native network tools after November 2024, the team may be used to working without approvals at all. Reintroducing governance is a change management job, and the quote should say who leads it.

## A first-year budget, line by line

It helps to lay out the first year as a set of lines rather than a single total, because each line has a different owner and a different way of being negotiated. A typical shape looks like this: the publishing subscription for the agreed seats and plan, any premium add-ons, the vendor's onboarding package if you take one, the Salesforce integration and reporting build from your implementation partner, an integration user licence in your org, internal time for the social operations owner, and a modest allowance for training regional teams. Only the first of these is published, which is why the seat arithmetic above is worth doing carefully. Everything else should come back from bidders as a named line, not folded into a lump sum.

## How to get quotes you can compare

Two quotes are needed for most of these projects: the publishing vendor's subscription and onboarding, and the integration and change work, which may come from the vendor's services team or from a Salesforce partner. Ask both for the same breakdown.

From the vendor, ask for the plan, the number of seats, the add-ons, the price for any onboarding package, and in writing which plan includes the Salesforce integration you need. From the services side, ask for separate figures for discovery and inventory, workspace and permissions design, the Salesforce integration by object, reporting, training and a short hypercare period. Ask what they assume your team will do, such as connecting each social profile, because that work is easy to leave off a quote and hard to finish late.

Firms that understand both sides are tested on [who to hire for Buddy Media](/hire-buddy-media-salesforce-partner), and the technical patterns are on [integrating Buddy Media with Salesforce](/integrating-buddy-media-with-salesforce).

## Costs that are easy to miss

| Item | Why it comes up | Who prices it |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Extra seats for approvers | Reviewers often need a seat to approve | Publishing vendor |
| Premium add-ons | Listening, advocacy and similar features sit outside the base plan | Publishing vendor |
| Vendor onboarding package | Some vendors charge for guided setup | Publishing vendor |
| Salesforce integration user | The connection needs a licensed user in your org | Salesforce order form |
| Archive storage | Records retention for regulated industries | Your own budget or an archiving vendor |
| Internal social operations time | Someone has to own profiles, permissions and tags | Your own budget |

Seats are the item most often underestimated. Count everyone who drafts, approves or replies, not just the central social team, and check whether occasional approvers can use a lighter option.

Look again at approvers in particular. In regulated organisations the legal or compliance reviewer may approve only a handful of posts a week, yet without a seat they cannot approve inside the tool, and approvals drift back into email where nothing is recorded. Ask the vendor how occasional reviewers are licensed, and price the answer before you decide the approval design, not after.

Contract terms matter too. Annual billing gives the lower Essentials rate on Sprout, but locks in seats. If the rollout is phased by region, ask for a seat ramp so you are not paying for markets that have not started.

## Where this fits with the other Buddy Media pages

The acquisition history is on [what happened to Buddy Media](/what-happened-to-buddy-media), and the retirement itself is explained on [the Buddy Media and Social Studio page](/buddy-media-social-studio-retirement). If you are still paying for anything carrying the old name, start with [the Buddy Media licence cost page](/buddy-media-salesforce-licence-cost). If you are choosing where to move, [should I migrate from Buddy Media](/should-i-migrate-from-buddy-media) sets out the options, and this page gives you the numbers to put next to them.

## Questions

### Can I still implement Buddy Media or Social Studio?

No. Buddy Media's publishing features became part of Social Studio, and Salesforce retired Social Studio subscriptions on 18 November 2024. Any quote to implement either product is pricing something Salesforce no longer sells.

### What did Salesforce recommend instead of Social Studio?

In March 2022 Salesforce and Sprout Social announced a global partnership aimed at Social Studio customers. Sprout integrates with Salesforce products including Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. Other publishing suites also connect to Salesforce, so it is worth comparing more than one.

### How much does Sprout Social cost per seat?

As at October 2026 Sprout lists Essentials at US$79 per seat per month billed annually or US$99 monthly, Standard at US$199, Professional at US$299 and Advanced at US$399. Enterprise is custom and quoted after a demo.

### What part of a replacement project is Salesforce work?

Mapping social profiles to Contacts or Leads, creating Leads from social conversations, setting up the integration user and field ownership, and deciding where social reporting lives. The publishing setup itself is mostly configuration in the new tool.

### Should paid social sit in the same budget?

Usually not. Organic publishing, community management and paid campaigns have different owners and tools. Price ad audience activation on its own, for example through Data 360, so it does not hide inside a publishing subscription.

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SynconAI is a Salesforce Select Partner and an OpenAI Select Partner, delivering architect-led Salesforce and AI programmes across the United States and Australia. Related service: Marketing Cloud Next (https://synconai.com/salesforce-marketing-cloud-next).