What is a social media CRM platform?

Customer relationship management (CRM) software started out as databases of merged customer contact information and customer behavior data. In the 30 years or so since, CRMs have become businesses’ central nervous systems.

CRM platforms supply organizations with multi-dimensional customer profiles that help predict, control, and automate sales practices while continuing to collect information.

With the introduction of social media, businesses are better able to collect customer data and track online behavior through open social channels. Social CRM software merges social information with a business’s existing CRM software to give a thorough overview of an individual’s online behavior.

Why merge social and CRM data?

Merging social data and CRM data adds a valuable facet to customer profiles while centralizing the information. It permits you to see your customers’ interactions with your brand on any channel and gives you greater insight into who they are.

This knowledge is mutually beneficial, allowing you to tap into these relationships while also making you better prepared to interact with your customers.

Customers today expect brands to be aware of past points of contact, as well as their purchase history. If they leave a Facebook comment, reach out to your support team on Twitter, or give you a mention on Instagram, they expect you to be aware of their previous activity, especially if it’s been positive.

Social media CRM platforms give any team within your organization access to that information and strengthens your customers’ relationship with your brand.

Reaching potential customers through social listening is better managed when coupled with CRM software to track activity on a variety of keywords.

What are the ways to use social CRM platforms?

Let’s talk about ways to apply social media CRM data. Here are five practical applications:

1. Optimize each customer relationship

Do you know the average spend of each of your customers, their buying patterns, how they respond to your newsletters, and which products they’re most likely to purchase? Take this information and couple it with social media data.

You can build out your customer profiles and have an overview of what people talk about, then proactively respond when it pertains to your business. By adding in your customers’ social behavior, you’re able to see their interests, interactions, and other brands and influencers they follow.

2. Tailor your social content

Social media CRM gives you an overview of topics, hashtags, and influencers within your audience segments. Leverage this data to provide timely, pertinent content and boost engagement.

Continue to hone your social content strategy by tying performance analytics to your audience. Reach your customers with targeted messaging based on their interests and ensure that your content is resonating with your focus audience right from the start.

3. Enrich your social customer support

Currently, 80% of companies claim to deliver excellent customer service on social media, but only 8% of customers agree. It’s pretty clear that social customer support is lacking for many brands.

With a CRM social media integration, you can provide support that incorporates a customer’s interaction history across social channels. By pulling social data directly into your CRM, the same information is accessible to anyone within your organization

Regardless of where your customers are talking about your business, you can quickly respond to them on the channel of their choice. You’ll be able to catch any negative mentions and provide complete support tailored to their experience.

4. Develop your social advertising

Social media CRM software helps to shape your target audiences, allowing you to create custom and lookalike audiences that you can pull directly into Facebook Ads Manager. You can also identify your customers’ purchasing habits and tailor your social ads to their buying behavior with customized offers.

Give your brand advocates and influencers the first peek at new products through advertising created just for them. Alternatively, use segmenting and labels to remind customers to restock purchases they’ve made in the past. Social CRM software offers a wealth of opportunities for improving your paid social campaigns.

5. Suggest relevant purchases

Tracking your customers’ purchases and then predicting what they’d be most likely to buy next is easier when you can tie it to social media. You can develop customized ad campaigns for purchases similar to theirs, then direct them to related products.

Build audiences for specific products, and use purchase patterns and social mentions to target messaging. Using social media CRM software makes targeted purchase suggestions more precise and personal, increasing the likelihood that your customers will buy your products in the future.

How to implement a successful social CRM strategy?

Now that you know some handy tips of what to use a social CRM platform for, let’s look into the key ingredients of a successful social CRM strategy.

1. Invest in the right tools

First things first, you need to invest in the right tools to get the ball rolling on your social and CRM integration efforts. Look for a tool that gives you a complete overview of your customer interactions via email, phone, chat, and social networks from a single place.

A typical social CRM tool should take care of the following needs:

  • Deliver customer support via social media networks
  • Social listening features to monitor brand mentions
  • Real-time notifications when customers interact with a brand
  • Analytics to measure the effectiveness of your customer communication

(You will find some tool recommendations further down this article.)

2. Include sales and customer support in the process

It’s not just marketing that takes center stage here.

To improve both speed and quality of responses, including sales and customer support representatives in the process is vital for a successful social CRM strategy. Be sure to align all three teams on the brand voice as both social media representatives, sales reps, and customer support teams will be tackling prospect/customer queries.

3. Use social listening to monitor keywords

Set up keyword monitoring in your social CRM tool to keep track of your brand mentions and interactions. This way you are always on alert when a customer mentions your brand and asks a question about your product/service.

Remember, customer expectations are rapidly changing and only businesses with the best customer service experience realize higher revenues. So, be proactive and helpful to all your incoming queries.

4. Measure your results

The key to a successful social CRM strategy is to measure your results. Find out how many tickets your team responded to and the average handling time for each ticket. This way, you can tell if you’re meeting your targets and providing a positive customer experience to the people who engage with your brand.

What are some of the social CRM tools?

Like I said before, you’re going to need some tools up your sleeve to implement a successful social CRM strategy so, take a look at the few options we’ve listed below. Also, pay close attention to tool number four, it’s a personal favorite (for obvious reasons).

1. Zoho CRM

First on the list we got Zoho CRM. This tool allows you to reach customers across every channel: telephone, email, live chat, and social media. You also get real-time notifications when customers interact with your business.

And to tell whether you’re meeting your customer expectation or not, Zoho CRM also allows you to measure the effectiveness of your customer communication and find the best time and channel to reach out to your customers.

2. Nimble

Nimble makes it super easy to unify your contact data. The tool automatically combines contacts, social media connections, inboxes, and calendar appointments with over 160 apps and CRMs into one unified relationship manager.

Additionally, you can also easily locate contact information and team’s interaction history to access a 360-degree view of your customers and leads. You can also add notes to a record, update deal status, and access social handles.

3. Engagebay

Engagebay is a free Social CRM tool that helps view all your contacts/leads and also every interaction you have ever had with them. You’re probably tired of hearing this, but this is yet another tool that gives a complete 360-degree view of all your contacts and companies from within a single frame.

You also get deep customer insights to empower yourself and your team to sell better and forge stronger customer relationships to convert complete strangers into happy customers.

4. Brandwatch

And then there is us!

While we may not brand ourselves as an exclusive social CRM tool, we do have a pretty cool solution to connect your CRM with social data that offers a 360-degree view of current and potential customers, syncing with your CRM data to create individual profiles for each customer. The end result is a clean and simple UX that can provide information on a single customer, or gather information to show trends and segments. One of many advantages is labeling. A label could be anything relevant to your business, from ‘influencer’ to ‘sports fan’. By adding customer labels relevant to your business, you not only have an extra attribution to aid customer service, but also the basis of a new custom segment.

All these features are designed to make it easier to manage your customer relationships in a streamlined, innovative way. Speak to our team to see how we can help you.

Final thoughts

Through social CRM, social media managers can gain a comprehensive view of their audiences, deliver highly targeted content, and offer dedicated support. It’s a perfect merging of data that empowers SMMs and provides a wealth of intelligence to organizations.

Social CRM platforms have the power to connect marketers directly with their audience. That’s why they’re a must for modern marketers and SMMs.