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.
Businesses primarily use social CRM tools to know the opinions about their brand on social media. 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.
- 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.
Most products in the market are priced on a “per user per month” basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price.
Price ranges*:
*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering that was found on vendor websites on May 30, 2019. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentile of the pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products.
The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise, or premium product, which is priced higher, may include some additional features such as advanced analytics, automatic moderation, longer data retention, and XLS data exports.
- 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. Before buying a solution, find out the percentage of your target audience that’s active on social media. This should influence whether you need a core social CRM tool or an integration with your CRM software.
- 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.
- Explore free and freemium solutions: Free social CRM tools are equally capable of addressing your basic businesses needs. Some vendors offer free versions of their paid solutions that have basic functionalities. Before you purchase a solution, explore the free options to assess whether or not the solution meets your needs.
Sources
Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Capterra’s directory page. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in Capterra’s directory that offer them.
The following sources were used for this document:
