A social CRM is the integration between your customer relationship management (CRM) software and social media channels. This empowers your teams to understand and engage customers, gain market insights, and provide better customer service.
With more than 3 billion active users who spend time every day exploring, sharing, and discussing their interests, social media platforms are where consumers stumble upon brands of which they ultimately become loyal customers. Every business, from SMBs to large enterprises, requires a social media strategy to expand its reach, increase brand exposure, bring in prospects, and engage existing customers with quality content.
Internet users (4% YOY increase)
Active social media users (10.1% YOY increase)
Unique mobile users (1.8% YOY increase)
Active mobile social media users (10% YOY increase)** Source - Digital 2019: Global Overview Report
How does a traditional CRM differ from a social CRM?
The central strategy
TRADITIONAL CRM:
Collecting, managing, and acting on customer data. Communications are mostly transactional, whether it's a sales rep trying to close a deal or a support agent helping customers resolve their issues.
SOCIAL CRM:
Customer engagement and brand exposure without hard selling. Most of these interactions serve to spark interest in your brand and initiate conversations about customer interests or trending social issues.
The difference in customer interaction
TRADITIONAL CRM:
The business controls the flow of conversations through standard communication channels and predefined time slots, which are restricted to the working hours of the business.
SOCIAL CRM:
Social media takes the power and control from the business and puts it in the hands of the customer. They are free to initiate conversations and interact with businesses at their leisure.
What do social media users expect?
Thanks to social media, people are more interconnected than ever before. Through their online interactions with peers, industry experts, and influencers, social media users can gather all the information they need about products and brands before ever making a purchase. With that power come certain expectations:
A unified user experience, regardless of which channel they use to interact with a business.
Useful, relevant, and high-quality content shared by the brands on social media
A positive experience with customer service via social media
Active and real-time responses to customers via social media—if they post about an issue, they expect a resolution from the company within an hour.
Why use a social CRM?
A social CRM provides a comprehensive view of customer habits and behaviors by supplementing traditional metrics with relevant social media data. Use it to track when consumers are talking about your brands and on which platforms.
Built-in social CRM functionalities
Some CRMs already come with built-in social media functionality. These functionalities enable you to receive notifications from your official social media accounts, alerting you to messages and posts relevant to your organization.
Standalone social CRM software
CRMs with no built-in social media functionalities require third-party integrations with standalone software platforms in order to access the social media functions and insights within the CRM.
Types of social CRMs
What are the benefits of a social CRM?
01
Empower your support team
Your CRM equips your customer support reps with the necessary information to troubleshoot customer problems and offer quick resolutions.
02
Understand your audience
By bringing in real-time data, social CRM tools provide valuable insights into what makes your target audience tick. You can share this information with your teams to offer potential customers a personalized and consistent customer experience.
03
Publish relevant content
Don't add to the noise. Leverage the information gathered from social media to create interesting and engaging pieces of content, and push it through the right channels to maximize traction.
04
Give social context to your interaction
The insights gathered from your social media CRM help you initiate and hold meaningful conversations with your prospects, which fosters a better relationship with them and humanizes your brand.
05
Instantaneous feedback
Whether it's good or bad, a social media CRM enables instantaneous feedback from your customers. This helps you improve your products and services and gather results without having to seek out feedback constantly.
06
Improve brand reach and perception
Through social media, you can identify brand advocates and influencers and collaborate with them to improve your reach and brand perception.
Companies that increase their social media output by 10% see a
7%
Increase in brand awareness
4%
Increase in customer satisfaction
Every 10% increase in social media aspects such as likes, comments, mentions, and followers results in a
12%
Increase in brand awareness
3%
Increase in customer satisfaction
6%
Increase in purchase intent
Social CRM challenges
01
Identifying essential information
With the sheer volume of social media data at your disposal, it can be challenging to identify information that's actually meaningful and useful to your business. Focusing on the wrong data can be a waste of your team's valuable time and effort.
02
Keeping up with new platforms and trends
The ever-growing number of social media channels on the market means you have to stay on your toes. Apart from the shifting landscape of social media platforms, it can be challenging to keep up with customers' ever-changing social media habits across platforms.
03
Transforming customer data into strategies
With the dizzying amount of social media data at your disposal, there's a high chance of getting lost in it. It's all the more important to organize your customer data and come up with customer-specific strategies to optimize the utility of your social media CRM.
04
Adapting your team to changes
Constantly evolving social landscapes—coupled with changing customer interests and needs—means that teams must strive to keep pace and adapt to market scenarios. This can be achieved by staying up to date with the latest social media trends and customer interactions.
05
No immediate results
The whole process of gathering customer data from social profiles, organizing it, designing effective customer service strategies, and analyzing the outcomes takes time and provides a gradual ROI. Persistence and consistently excellent customer service are key to tackling this challenge.
Social listening
A key aspect of any social CRM is the ability to gather information from customers by monitoring what people are saying on social media about your brands. Understanding what customers want—whether they're existing, former, or even competitors' customers—helps fine-tune your business operations to serve your customers better.
Integration with multiple social media platforms
The number of social media users across all platforms grows everyday, continually renewing the opportunity to locate, monitor, and engage existing and potential customers. A CRM that integrates with popular platforms is invaluable in helping you penetrate the intricate web of social media and establish your brand.
Lead generation
You've established a social media presence and people are constantly engaging your brand; so what's next? It's important to capitalize on this and push these prospects to your CRM, so your sales team can reach out to them and see if they can be converted into paying customers.
Unified omnichannel experience
Your communication with potential customers may not be limited just to social channels, but could be spread across emails, phone calls, and even live chats. It's important to ensure that you're notified of these interactions in real time so that you can respond to them without delay. By centralizing the history of your organization's social media interactions and making it available to customer-facing teams, this engagement can be seamless and consistent.
Popular social media integrations
Go Social With Zoho CRM
Monitor and participate in social media activities to understand and establish good rapport with your prospects and customers.
Assign roles and control who can access what in your social media CRM.
Analyze social media activities like comments, posts, likes, tweets, retweets, messages, and mentions of your brand to track how your brand is being perceived.
Add prospective customers obtained from social media as leads or contacts into your Zoho CRM account.
Filter and classify your social media data as per your business requirements to avoid clutter and enhance efficiency.
Keep track of all your social media CRM activities through activity logs so you can revisit them as needed.
Automate predictable tasks—like adding a lead or contact—based on conditions you specify. This saves you time and effort and also reduces possible manual errors.
