A special class of symmetric Killing 2-tensors

We study symmetric Killing 2-tensors on Riemannian manifolds and show that several additional conditions can be realised only for Sasakian manifolds and Euclidean spheres. In particular we show that (three)-Sasakian manifolds can also be characterized by properties of the symmetric products of their characteristic 1-forms. Moreover, we recover a result of S.~Gallot on the characterization of spheres by means of functions satisfying a certain differential equation of order three.