Social CRM or integration of social media channels into CRM platforms. Increasingly, CRM platforms support social media alongside traditional channels so customers can interact with businesses via their preferred channels. This means better customer service and greater marketing insight gathered from customer social media data.
Just getting started on your CRM journey?
Learn everything you need to know about finding, winning, and keeping customers with The Beginner's Guide to CRM.
Why do businesses need social CRM?
Social CRM makes it possible for a business to communicate with customers using the channel of their choice—whether by phone, text, chat, email or social media. Off the back of these interactions, a social CRM system helps businesses gather richer, actionable insight about customer sentiment on their company, their brand, and specific products or services.
The best CRM systems are able to take this dynamic customer profile and put it to good use by disseminating that information across different teams, including customer service, marketing and sales.
Using social CRM for customer service
Social CRM is used by businesses looking to optimize service levels and the multi-channel customer experience. It can help businesses get the basics of customer service right, responding seamlessly in the way that suits the customer best.
Today’s consumer expects the same great service from a business regardless of channel.
Customer expectations are rising
Consumers expect to be able to move easily between channels of communication and for the business to respond promptly and personally in any of them. If the business can remember them so they don’t have to explain themselves again, even better.
This is especially important as customers increasingly see social media as the easiest way to raise a service query. With social CRM, when a customer chooses to contact a business via a social channel, that interaction can be tracked and managed in as much detail as a traditional CRM system can track a telephone or email enquiry.
The business benefit
Businesses are able to act more quickly, respond better, and even anticipate customers' upcoming needs. By enabling businesses to track social interactions with customers using the same sophisticated tools as they use for other touchpoints, companies can deliver faster, more complete resolutions to customer service cases from across the whole business, resulting in happier customers.
Social interactions take place on a one-to-one-to-many basis, meaning the way in which the interaction is resolved can impact directly on brand sentiment.
A customer service agent dealing directly with a customer on Facebook is engaging in a personal interaction with a public audience. It’s easy and logical for customers to want to share socially about their service experience afterward, too.
Experience Salesforce with an interactive demo.
Get hands on with our products and explore real use cases and solutions built for agentic enterprises.
Using social CRM for marketing
Social CRM helps businesses make customer engagement a two-way street. Instead of a passive audience, customers become active participants in the story of a brand, and in turn, they get to see a brand value them as a customer.
A marketing team may be producing great content — blog articles, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Instagram content — but that part of the conversation is one-way. By using monitoring and tracking tools to see who’s engaging in conversation with the business, social CRM can help businesses to identify and reward brand advocates and influencers, encouraging them to spread the word still further.
What are the benefits of social CRM?
For the marketing, sales and customer service departments, social CRM can help generate more leads that turn into happier, satisfied customers who go on to become brand ambassadors for an organization. It can change the understanding of brand reach and perception while providing access to a raft of new information about customer behavior and opinions.
Key benefits of social CRM
1. Deliver customer support in the online platforms customers use
2. Interact and engage with customers in real time
3. Resolve issues speedily by monitoring social media for complaints
4. Find and reward brand advocates and customers who help others
5. Get greater exposure in the places where audiences spend their time
6. Increase engagement and deepen relationships with customers
The business case for social CRM
Social CRM has the potential to deliver returns across and between several core business functions:
Customer service
82% of service organizations use social media channels. By tracking and managing customer contacts across channels and business functions, customer service teams can deliver dramatically better service and markedly improve resolution times.
Sales
Track each prospect’s progress and location within the sales funnel using a social CRM. Sales teams can create a personalized experience for specialized users, rather than using the traditional CRM blanket approach. Beyond individualization, sales teams can expect to see an improvement in retained and referred business as customers become recommenders and advocates; and that leads to increased revenue.
Marketing
Increased reach and visibility, lower costs. Marketers can use social CRM to increase reach while improving customer tracking and measurement. This can feed back into other marketing tactics and help drive lead generation and sales.
Become an Agentic Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide
Get a practical roadmap for transforming AI potential into business reality.
Social CRM FAQs
A social CRM is a type of customer relationship management system that integrates social media platforms and tools to help businesses engage with customers and prospects. It enables companies to listen to social conversations, respond to inquiries, and incorporate social data into customer profiles to gain a more complete view of their audience.
With social CRM, when a customer contacts a business via a social channel, that interaction can be tracked and managed in the same way that a traditional CRM system tracks a telephone or email enquiry. Social CRM enables businesses to engage with customers on social media, then leverage that engagement to offer better service.
Social CRM benefits sales and marketing by providing valuable insights from social media data. It allows businesses to identify potential leads, track brand mentions, understand customer sentiment, and engage in real-time conversations, which helps in personalizing outreach, honing marketing messages, and building stronger customer relationships.
A social CRM can track a variety of social media data, including brand mentions, comments, likes, shares, direct messages, and customer sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral). This data is often linked directly to customer records within the CRM to provide context and a complete interaction history.
Social CRM helps improve customer service by providing a dedicated channel for support. It allows businesses to monitor for customer service inquiries on social media, quickly respond to issues, and route complex cases to the right support agent, all while maintaining a public record of good customer engagement.
Yes, social CRM is suitable for most types of businesses, regardless of size or industry. For small businesses, it offers a cost-effective way to engage with customers and build their brand presence. For larger enterprises, it helps manage high volumes of social media interactions and integrate social data across various departments.
Keep up with the latest in CRM with guides, research, and insights.
Take the next step with the world's #1 AI CRM.
Start your trial.
Try Salesforce CRM free for 30 days. No credit card required. Nothing to install.
Talk to an expert.
Ask about Salesforce products, pricing, implementation, or anything else. Our highly trained reps are standing by, ready to help.
Stay up to date.
Get the latest research, industry insights, and product news delivered straight to your inbox.
