Social suites are now a critical part of the martech ecosystem, ranking as one of the top three marketing technologies used by organizations. Once simple social media management tools with light social listening features, these platforms have evolved into unified solutions that go well beyond those capabilities. Forrester now defines social suites as:

Platforms that combine multiple social tech capabilities, such as social content planning and publishing, consumer intelligence, creator marketing, and customer response, into a single, unified offering.

In our newly published report, The Social Suites Landscape, Q1 2026, we examine how 13 vendors deliver business value for marketers, explore current trends and challenges in this category, and outline the top core and extended use cases for social suites. Here are four of our biggest takeaways:

  1. AI is shifting from assistive to agentic. In our last Forrester Wave™ evaluation covering social suites, AI features primarily supported marketers with tasks such as writing responses or routing posts. These capabilities are maturing, and vendors are now planning for “agentic” experiences. In the near term, customers will leverage suites’ prebuilt and custom AI agents to handle tasks like publishing, content approval, and data analysis — fundamentally changing how they interact with these platforms.
  2. Enterprise-grade governance will become nonnegotiable. Regulatory complexity is rising, especially for enterprises in regulated industries. Social suites must now deliver audit-ready governance and compliance, including granular role assignments, standardized workflows for FedRAMP and GDPR, and secure forms. Many vendors still lag here, but catching up is critical to compete.
  3. Brands want a unified social media data standard. Measuring social media ROI has long been challenging due to data silos, inconsistent KPIs, and walled gardens. In fact, two of the top challenges remain for organizations: having too many metrics to measure and inconsistent data quality. Leading vendors simplify this complexity by creating a unified view of social data and enriching it with additional data sources such as CRM, customer service, or creator performance data.
  4. Creator marketing is the next frontier. While many vendors now support creator marketing, most lack the sophistication of point solutions like CreatorIQ or Traackr. Given the explosive growth of creator marketing, they should probably try to fill this gap. In the near term, vendors should focus on how they port creator data into their core capabilities: unified measurement and content planning.

Forrester clients: Looking to evaluate your social suite? Access the full report or schedule a guidance session with me to talk about the vendors that are best suited to your needs. Stay tuned for the next Forrester Wave covering social suites, to be published in Q2 of this year.