Social CRM: How (and why) to manage customer relationships on social

Social media provides businesses with direct, real-time access to their customers. Each interaction tells a story that can be explored and learned from. But without a social CRM tool, that information stays isolated within marketing teams.

The right social media management tool can unite teams around deep customer insights, cutting confusion and increasing collaboration. The 2023 State of Social Media report reveals that 96% of business leaders anticipate integrating social data into their company's CRM within the next three years. Making moves today can put your brand ahead of the game tomorrow.

In this guide, we explain what social CRM is, how it can benefit your business, and the tools you can use to enhance your business with social insights.

What is social CRM?The key benefits of social CRMThe top 3 social CRM software and tools

What is social CRM?

Social CRM, also known as social customer relationship management, is a process for managing customer relationships that includes and emphasizes the interactions that take place on social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

Historically, social data has been siloed from contact profiles in traditional CRM software. Thankfully, modern brands can now use integrated social media management tools to enrich data across lead generation and CRM software, creating a more accurate view of customer behavior.

The key benefits of social CRM

Every day, your customers log on to their social platforms of choice to share opinions, recommendations and everything in between. Your social team can track conversations related to your brand, but without a process for internal distribution, these valuable insights remain limited to the marketing department.

Social CRM structures and streamlines the delivery of your most valuable source of business intelligence—your social data. The result amplifies the benefits of a social media strategy at the cross-functional level.

Democratize social insights

As market headwinds and consumer priorities shift, one thing is certain: no business is guaranteed. The differences that separate the 'must haves' from the 'nice to haves' are slim. Companies must stay in lockstep with their audience to maintain a competitive edge.

It's no wonder gaining a better understanding of customers is the second highest priority for business leaders in today's economic environment.

That better understanding starts with a commitment to achieving a 360-degree view of your customer. Leading brands aren’t settling for information from most touchpoints—email, digital ads, CSAT surveys, etc. They’re looking for the complete picture, and that can’t exist without social data.

Leaders near-unanimously (91%) agree that social data positively impacts their understanding of customers. With social CRM, you can ensure all of your colleagues can deliver the right message to the right people and the right time.

Generate and nurture leads

Social media teams are the eyes and ears of a business. With the right processes in place, they can help sales and service teams ensure they never miss an opportunity.

Social CRM supports lead generation, qualification and nurturing by facilitating a more seamless hand-off between customer-facing teams. In practice, that might look like:

Social teams creating targeted ad audiences based on previous interactions with your brand across multiple touch points.Sales and marketing teams collaborating on ABM strategies that encompass all channels, including personal social profiles.Using social listening to surface opportunities to create surprise and delight moments through proactive customer care.

In each of these scenarios, every team member is empowered to create tickets and pass tasks on to the appropriate colleague. This streamlines their workload and creates a more seamless experience for the customer.

Deliver better customer care

You can’t deliver on outstanding customer care if you don’t know who your customers are. This is an issue that has plagued social and service teams for years. Without the proper integrations in place, handling customer issues on social media is a disjointed experience for all parties involved.

Social CRM tools cut through that confusion by collecting additional context from a primary CRM to inform social media engagements. This context equips teams with the information they need to provide superior customer service at scale.

Collaboration at this level not only enables teams to provide excellent customer service today—it sets them up to do so in the future.

Take Hudl, for example. Their team uses data from Sprout, their social CRM, to understand how seasonality impacts their inbound social message volume. The company then uses that data to staff teams appropriately during high volume months.

One of the most helpful metrics we get from Sprout is volume—especially, our seasonal volume. We don’t train every rep to handle social media work. And in the past, it was very difficult for us to forecast our staffing. The reports we generate from Sprout allow us to gauge when we need to ramp up social support, and when it’s best to guide customers to self-service support and tutorials.