Social Relationship Platforms (SRPs) like Sprinklr, Sprefast, and Hootsuite save marketers time and help them more effectively manage their branded Facebook pages and Twitter accounts — but most marketers still don't use these valuable tools.

We recently analyzed the Facebook posts made by 5,000 large brand pages and found that two-thirds post exclusively through Facebook's native tools. That's right: 67% of the biggest brands we could find didn't make a single Facebook post through a third-party vendor during the six week window we studied.

Most social marketers post exclusively through Facebook native tools

Twitter marketers are more likely than Facebook marketers to use SRPs — but not by much. We looked at almost 3,000 large Twitter accounts and found that about half post natively 50% of the time or more.

Even when marketers do hire social relationship platforms, they often do most of their posting natively. This was true on both the social networks we studied, but it's especially pronounced on Twitter. In fact, most SRPs find the majority of their clients do at least 50% of their Twitter posting natively.

Most Twitter Marketers That Use Social Relationship Platforms Use Them Less Than Half The Time

(To be clear on our methodology: We only reviewed Facebook pages and Twitter accounts owned by brand marketers, not by celebrities, governments, media companies, or sports teams or leagues — becuase brand marketers face different challenges and use different organizational structures than those other types of pages. The Facebook pages we studied had at least 500,000 fans each; the Twitter accounts we studied had at least 50,000 followers each. We looked at the metadata on every visible post these accounts made for six weeks in Q3, 2015. Socialbakers collected this publicly-available data for us, but no one outside Forrester did any of the data analysis or wrote any of the findings.)

I've talked to lots of marketers about why they don't use social relationship platforms. Some find SRPs lack functionality or responsiveness. Others don't think SRPs are easy enough to use. Still others have hired SRPs but haven't bought a large enough license for all their social marketers. If you don't use an SRP — or use one, but not for all of your posts — I'd be curious to hear why in the comments below.

But whatever the reason, this is a missed opportunity for both marketers and vendors. SRPs make social marketing more efficient and effective. Every marketers should hire, and use, a social relationship platform.

For more detail and data, Forrester clients check out our new report "Most Marketers Don't Use Social Relationship Platforms."