# Who to hire for Buddy Media on Salesforce

Buddy Media's publishing tools ended with Social Studio on 18 November 2024. The useful hire now is a short archive and selection project for social publishing, and a buyer who spots a Buddy Media implementation pitch should walk away.

**Published:** 2026-01-08
**Canonical:** https://synconai.com/hire-buddy-media-salesforce-partner
**Author:** SynconAI Architecture Team

## In short

Nobody can implement Buddy Media today, because Salesforce retired the Marketing Cloud Social Studio subscriptions on 18 November 2024. A pitch to do so is a warning sign. What a partner can usefully do is archive your publishing history, run a selection of a replacement social publishing tool, and rebuild approvals and governance around it.

## 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.
- **Marketing Cloud Social Studio Retirement Announced** (retrieved 2026-10-13)
  https://gettectonic.com/marketing-cloud-social-studio-retirement-announced/
  > Salesforce recommends retrieving your Social Studio data at least 90 days before the Order End Date

## What to take away

- Buddy Media's publishing function ended with Social Studio on 18 November 2024, so any pitch to implement it should be refused.
- Three pieces of work are worth hiring for: an archive of publishing history, a tool selection, and a rebuild of approval and governance rules.
- Ask a candidate who owned content calendars and approval flows for a regulated brand, not who has Salesforce social logos.
- Many teams can run a replacement publishing tool without a partner, so keep the engagement to the parts that need discipline.

## The guide

If you are reading this because a proposal landed on your desk that says "Buddy Media implementation", stop and check the date on it. The publishing product that Buddy Media became inside Salesforce no longer exists as something you can buy or switch on. The honest version of this hiring question is therefore about what comes after: your social team still has to schedule posts across channels, route drafts to legal, keep a record of what went out and report on it. This page explains who is worth hiring for that work, and how to tell them from the firms that are still selling a product that has gone.

## What retired, and what that means for a hire

Salesforce's own retirement notice, published on its help site, says that "Salesforce retired the following Marketing Cloud Social Studio subscriptions (“Marketing Cloud Social Studio Products”) on November 18, 2024." Buddy Media's publishing and community management functions had been folded into Social Studio, so that retirement is the one that matters for you. A [practitioner summary of the retirement notice](https://gettectonic.com/marketing-cloud-social-studio-retirement-announced/) adds the practical consequence for data: "Salesforce recommends retrieving your Social Studio data at least 90 days before the Order End Date" and the same notice says that customer data is deleted once the contract ends.

Two things follow. First, no partner can restore the product, and one who suggests they can has misread the situation or is hoping you have not checked. Second, whatever your social publishing history was worth, whether that is approved copy libraries, calendars, campaign tags or audit trails, the window to export it has closed unless you already did the work. If you did, the archive is an asset worth organising. If you did not, the first step is to find out exactly what you still hold.

It is also worth asking why you are hiring at all. Some buyers arrive here because a board paper or a compliance review mentions Buddy Media as a system of record. In that case the hire is a records exercise, and the person you need is closer to an information manager than a marketing technologist. Others arrive because a team has been publishing in a spreadsheet since the retirement and wants its process back. Different motives lead to different shortlists, so write the motive into the brief before you approach anyone.

## Three jobs that are worth paying for

Strip away the vendor labels and a social publishing programme leaves three pieces of work a partner can sensibly do.

**An archive.** Take what you exported and make it usable: a searchable record of what was published, when, on which account, approved by whom, and with which campaign. Legal and compliance teams in regulated industries ask for exactly this years later. A partner here is closer to a records specialist than a Salesforce developer, and the deliverable is a dataset and an index, not a platform.

**A selection.** Choosing a replacement publishing tool is a requirements exercise. The question is not which tool is best in the abstract but which one fits your channels, your volume of accounts, your approval structure and your reporting needs. A third-party article written during the retirement period named several alternatives, including Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Khoros, Sprinklr and Oktopost, and treated them as options for different needs rather than a ranking. A partner who runs the selection should be able to say which of your requirements are fixed and which are preferences, and should not be paid by the tool they recommend.

**A governance rebuild.** Approval chains, role permissions, brand and legal checklists, escalation for sensitive replies, and the rules about who can post to which account are what your team really loses when a tool disappears. The new tool will have its own configuration, and this is where an experienced hand saves months of rework.

## How the jobs compare

| Job | Typical output | Who does it well | Who can skip a partner |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Archive | Indexed export of posts, approvals, tags | Records or data specialist | Teams with a small, clean export |
| Selection | Scored requirements and a shortlist | Independent social operations lead | Teams with one or two channels |
| Governance rebuild | Approval flows, roles, checklists in the new tool | Someone who ran approvals in a regulated brand | Teams with no formal approvals |
| Connection to Salesforce | Any case or lead hand-off from social | A Salesforce integration developer | Teams with no hand-off today |

The fourth row matters only if posts or replies fed Service Cloud or Sales Cloud records. Check [integrating Buddy Media with Salesforce](/integrating-buddy-media-with-salesforce) if that applies to you, and [should I migrate from Buddy Media](/should-i-migrate-from-buddy-media) if you are still working out whether anything needs to move at all.

## A realistic first engagement

Begin with a two-part discovery. The first part is an audit of what you hold: files exported before the retirement, scheduled calendars in spreadsheets, brand guidelines, approval emails, and the list of accounts and who had access. The second part is a requirements workshop with the people who publish and the people who approve, held separately so that the approvers' unspoken rules come out. The output is a short document: what you have, what you need, and what is missing.

From there the next step is usually the selection, run against a small set of tools chosen from your requirements. Ask for a trial with real content, not a vendor demonstration. Run it for a couple of weeks with two or three of your actual publishers, and ask them which tool they would be unhappy to lose. Only then plan the governance rebuild inside the winner, using the rules gathered in the workshop.

Keep the archive separate if it is large or regulated. It has a different owner, a different timetable and a different risk, and mixing it into the tool project is how both slip.

## What good governance looks like

Governance is the part of social publishing that buyers underestimate, and it is where a partner with real experience pays for themselves. A workable model usually has five parts. There is an account register that lists every profile, its owner, its login arrangements and its purpose. There are roles that separate people who draft, people who approve and people who publish, with a rule that nobody approves their own post. There is a content calendar with campaign tags that finance and legal can read. There is an escalation path for replies that touch complaints, safety or regulators. And there is a record of what was published and when, kept somewhere that survives a change of tool.

Notice that none of those five items depends on a particular product. That is the reason the governance rebuild is worth separating from the tool selection. If you write the rules first, any decent tool can be configured to follow them, and a future switch costs far less. If you let the tool dictate the rules, you will repeat this exercise the next time a vendor changes direction.

A candidate should be able to show you a register, a role matrix and an escalation flow from earlier work, with names removed. Ask which of them the client still uses, and ask what the partner would change. People who have done this properly speak about it with some embarrassment about the first version.

## Ten questions to put to any candidate

1. Which of the three jobs above are you proposing, and which are you leaving out on purpose?
2. Have you run a social publishing tool selection, and what requirement changed the shortlist?
3. How do you treat a recommendation where a vendor pays you a referral fee?
4. Describe an approval flow you built for a brand with a legal review step. What went wrong in the first month?
5. What would you do with a partial export that has missing approvers?
6. How do you handle account credentials and API tokens for ten social profiles during a switch?
7. What do you do about channel API changes that break scheduling after go-live?
8. How would you move a calendar of scheduled posts without double-publishing?
9. Who on your team has actually published for a brand, rather than configured a tool?
10. What do you hand over at the end so my team can run this without you?

Questions 5 and 8 separate people who have done the work from people who have read about it. A weak answer to question 8 usually ends with a duplicated post on a live account.

## A word on paid social and creative assets

Publishing tools often sit beside paid promotion, creative libraries and image rights. If your old set-up included an asset library, ask whether the licences and permissions on those images travelled with the files, because a library full of photographs with expired usage rights is a liability rather than an asset. If posts were boosted from the same tool, decide whether paid media will stay with the new publishing tool or move to the ad platforms directly. A partner should raise these points without being asked, since they change both the selection criteria and the archive.

## Red flags that are specific to this situation

The loudest red flag is any proposal that names Buddy Media or Social Studio as the thing to be implemented. Second is a fixed price quoted before anyone has asked what you still hold from your export. Third is a firm that is also a reseller for one tool and does not say so during selection. Fourth is a team that treats social publishing as a Salesforce admin task, with no one who has run a content calendar. And a fifth, quieter, is a promise to "migrate everything", because migration implies a destination that accepts the old structure, and the old structure was specific to a product that is no longer there.

## Checking references and evidence

Ask for a reference where the client switched publishing tools, and ask that reference what the partner did during the weeks when two tools overlapped. Ask for a sample approval matrix with client names removed. Ask to see how they documented the decision to choose one tool over another, because a selection with no written criteria is just a preference. A partner who has done this well will have an uncomfortable story about a channel that behaved differently in the new tool, and will tell it without being pushed.

## Commercial models and the statement of work

The archive and the selection both suit fixed fees, since the scope can be bounded by the number of accounts and the size of the export. The governance rebuild is better as a capped time-and-materials phase, because you will discover rules nobody wrote down. Whatever the model, the statement of work should list the accounts and channels in scope, the format of the archive, the selection criteria and who signs them off, any commissions or referral arrangements the partner has with tool vendors, a handover document, and a clause that credentials are held by you. For the licence and project money behind the old product, see [Buddy Media implementation cost](/buddy-media-salesforce-implementation-cost) and [the Buddy Media licence page](/buddy-media-salesforce-licence-cost).

## When you can skip a partner

If you publish to two or three channels, have a single approver and an export you can open in a spreadsheet, you do not need a partner. A capable social manager can choose a tool in a few evenings and set up approvals in an afternoon. A partner earns their place when several brands share accounts, when legal review is formal, or when your history has to be preserved for compliance reasons. The background on the retirement is at [what happened to Buddy Media](/what-happened-to-buddy-media). This page ranks no agency and names no tool as the right answer.

## Questions

### Can anyone still implement Buddy Media for me?

No. Buddy Media's publishing function sat inside Social Studio, and Salesforce retired the Social Studio subscriptions on 18 November 2024. A firm offering a Buddy Media implementation is describing something that cannot be switched on.

### What should I hire a partner to do instead?

Three jobs: archive your exported publishing history, run a selection of a replacement publishing tool, and rebuild approvals and governance in that tool. Keep each as a separate, bounded piece of work.

### Did Salesforce name a replacement for Social Studio?

This page does not name one. Third-party articles written during the retirement named tools such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Khoros as options. Treat any single recommendation with caution and ask who pays the adviser.

### What happens to my Social Studio data now?

Salesforce said customer data would be deleted once the contract ended, and recommended exporting well before the end date. If you exported, organise and index it. If you did not, find out what you still hold.

### Do I need a Salesforce partner for social publishing at all?

Often not. A small team on a few channels can run a replacement tool alone. Salesforce skills matter only if social posts or replies create cases, leads or contacts in your CRM.

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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).