Everything that you need to know about social CRM

What is social CRM?

Social CRM or social customer relationship management (CRM) is the integration of social media channels (i.e., Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, twitter etc.,) into CRM platforms. Nowadays, the world spends most of the time on social media both at home and at work. So, understanding how your organization’s social media post, customer profiles, customer sentiment, and service priorities are handled is very important. Social CRM serves as a multipurpose software tool that manages your company’s online presence, handles social posting, and enables merchants to stay connected to customers using social channels in order to help your business with marketing, sales and service.

Few notable core features of social CRM include: personalized customer profile analysis, social listening, social selling, sentiment analysis and syncing all social media platforms into single social CRM.

How does traditional CRM differ from Social CRM?

Apparently, social CRMs may sound similar to regular CRMs that also focuses on social media interactions.

But the former has few similarities and notable differences when compared to latter.

So, to some extent, social CRM is different from traditional CRM.

How to generate leads from social media?

Once you establish a social media presence, people will be constantly aware of your brand. So, the next step is to focus on generating leads from such social presence, so that your sales team can reach out to them and see if they can be converted into customers.

What is the best social media platform that I should use?

The best platform for generating leads is the platform your customers use. Having said that, most people agree that Facebook is the best site for social media lead generation as more than 2.45 billion people use Facebook every month. There are also few tools that Facebook offers to collect leads on its platform.

On a side note, HelloLeads offers built-in integration with Facebook, where you can integrate your Facebook account with HelloLeads, to convert your Facebook leads to customers. You can capture all your Facebook ad campaign leads into HelloLeads instantly and automate assignment of those leads to your team members. You can capture your leads with notes and requests for easy tracking and follow-ups.

Not only Facebook, more than 80% of B2B marketers, for example, depend on LinkedIn for lead generation.

So, next time, before starting a social media lead campaign, make sure you are familiar with the stats and facts of the different social platforms, their customer base. If they are in line with your target market, it is probably a good fit.

Social listening

Listen before you speak – you may be familiar with this saying.

It is essential that your brand listens to the audience. What issues do they have in mind? How can you help solve their problems?

Social listening is the process of monitoring social media channels to know and understand what the market in general is talking about and following mentions of your brand, competitors and product. Social listening is all you need to do to increase customer acquisition.

By social listening, you can create the kind of content your followers / customers actually want, come up with new ideas based on industry trends, improve your customer experience by interacting directly with customers, and thereby continuously alter your business strategy and communication strategy to fit the current market needs.

Social CRM, not only just allows sales people to speak directly with people, it also enables them to listen to what people are discussing with each other. By social listening, you will be able to reach out to and respond to anyone who has got a question or an issue.

Social selling

Social selling is an art of utilizing your social media presence and connections to identify, connect, communicate, understand and nurture sales prospects

If your brand has a LinkedIn profile, Instagram page, Facebook Business Page, or professional Twitter account, you have already created the platform for social selling.

On the other hand, social selling is not just about adding contacts to your social media account but creating and building relationships and listening for the right moment to join conversation so you can present yourself or your services as a solution to a problem. The aim is to address a persistent need to make your prospect’s life easier rather than becoming just another online annoyance to ignore.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis in social media helps in knowing what your competitors and other companies think about your brands and business. It simply refers to the Natural Language Processing and Text Analytics to determine the attitude of a writer/speaker with respect to a given topic.

Sentiment analysis often depends on documents relating to the ‘voice of the customer’ – for example, reviews, survey responses and social media posts — and scales sentiments according to the emotional ‘polarity’ of words, phrases and documents. It is contextual and can qualify sentiment words in relation to modifying parts-of-speech or phrases and the overall concept of the text.

Sentiment analysis can be automated for large collections of texts, such as online reviews, blogs, online news and social media. However, existing solutions for sentiment analysis still employs human analytical component. People don’t always agree on the interpretation of a given statement or document. By current standards, the most accurate algorithms would produce correct sentiment analyses equivalent to the rate of human harmony.

On another side note, experts at HelloLeads have understood the reach of messaging apps like WhatsApp in the business world. Using HelloLeads, you can connect with your add leads instantly in WhatsApp. You can pre-configure your WhatsApp messages based on your business needs send  custom WhatsApp messages to your leads and customers

Thus, a Social media CRM enables organizations to expand their sales, marketing and customer support capabilities into social media channels in several distinct ways thereby providing you a 360-degree view of customers and their needs.