What is a social CRM tool?

A social customer relationship management (CRM) tool is a combination of the features of social media and CRM software. The tool helps businesses engage with customers on various social media platforms. 

Businesses can track, monitor, and respond to all customer interactions using a centralized dashboard. This avoids asking employees to individually review hundreds of posts, mentions, comments, and hashtags every day.

The benefits of social CRM tools

Businesses primarily use social CRM tools to monitor their brand mentions on social media and manage interactions. Whether it’s a tweet complaining about a product or an Instagram story about your store, the tools let you address all such social interactions quickly and efficiently. 

Listed below are some of the benefits of using a social CRM tool: 

• Centralize all social media interactions: The software’s centralized dashboard lets you monitor and manage social media interactions. This saves a lot of time and ensures that no activity on, or mention of, your brand goes unacknowledged.
• Gain better insights into your target audience: Businesses can gain insights about their target audience with features such as social listening, customer social profiles, automated reports, and advanced analytics. These insights can help your sales and marketing teams improve customer segmentation and targeting.
• Improve customer retention and generate leads: The tool helps you quickly respond to queries on social media. This can improve retention as customers will notice that your business is prompt in responses. Using behavioural and linguistic triggers, you can also find prospective customers who like or follow you or your competitors.
• Engage customers and build your brand reputation: The tool keeps you connected with your target audience via their social feed. Quick responses to customer queries will keep them engaged with your brand, allowing you to build your reputation online.

Typical features of social CRM tools

• Social media integration: Connect multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin, to a single portal. 
• Centralized responding: Respond to comments, messages, and mentions on multiple social platforms from within the CRM system. 
• Content sharing: Share brand-related content on multiple social platforms to engage with existing and prospective customers.
• Social media monitoring: Listen for brand mentions by auto-monitoring comments, posts, and hashtags on various social media platforms. Seek out customer complaints and problems, while also identifying customer trends.
• Customer social profiles: Use publicly available data from customers’ social media accounts to understand your audience; also, get a better idea of the customers’ needs and interests.
• Reporting/analytics: Track and monitor audience engagement; also, get customized reports of their activity.

Considerations when buying social CRM tools

• Check for social media integration with your CRM tool: Many CRM solutions integrate with social media platforms and offer similar functionalities as social CRM tools .
• Assess your analytics requirements: Some vendors offer marketing and analytics tools with advanced tracking and analytical capabilities. These tools generate deeper insights than a social CRM tool. If your use case is more aligned with social media management or marketing, consider using these tools instead of social CRM.

Relevant social CRM tool trends

• Marketing and sales automation trends: As social media becomes "the" platform for sales and marketing campaigns , businesses will want a social CRM tool that offers this functionality or integrates with another platform that does. Some vendors are offering this functionality through third-party providers.
• Social commerce/selling to grow exponentially: As social commerce gains traction, social media platforms are proving to be integral . Businesses are using social media networks and messaging platforms, such as WeChat , to expand their digital storefronts. Based on this trend, we expect social CRM tool vendors to offer integrations with social commerce/selling tools. The integration would allow users to manage interactions and sales from a central portal.