Integrating Social Media into your CRM Strategy

Many businesses have more fans and followers on social media platforms than they do email or direct subscribers. Today’s consumer is plugged into the online world and even if you’re not an online business, you should still have an online strategy. Key to that strategy is an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Here’s how to get started:

Track Customer Touch Points

The possibilities for learning more about your customer base through social media are virtually endless, and only likely to keep growing. By integrating social media into your CRM strategy, you can track touch points, including:

Comments, likes, and sharing of your online communications (blog posts and tweets).
Online reviews and feedback and your customer service team’s response time.
What conversions are happening from social media, e.g. what leads, prospects, or sales are directed to your business from your social media feed.
Active vs. non-active followers. This could mean those people who interact with your posts — liking, commenting, or sharing, or otherwise engaging — vs. those people who follow your feed but do not take any action.

You can use this information to not only build a more robust customer service strategy, but also help inform other marketing efforts, such as:

Find similar audiences to your current followers using online advertising.
Perform customer surveys or ask questions of your followers to find out their preferences and specific needs.
Test messaging between split segments of your audience (A/B testing) to find out what is most effective.

These are just a few of the many possibilities that exist.

Use Your Current CRM to Inform Your Messaging

Through analyzing your existing CRM database, you can find information that can help you target your social media messaging, including keywords to focus on, what images might go over best, and even groups you could join and pages you could like.

Tying your social media to your existing CRM means you don’t have to re-invent the wheel. You can take the customer data you already have and use that to inform your outbound communication moving forward.

Stay Up-To-Date

You can also use social media to stay on top of your customer’s latest business news, look for new opportunities, and even find new leads.

For instance, consider if one of your customers posted that they have a big, milestone anniversary coming up. If you weren’t aware of that fact, you now would be and could send them a congratulatory card and gift. You could also see if there are other services you can offer that would tie into this event.

Similarly, a customer may also interact with their vendors and suppliers over social media, which could lead to more business connections and networking for you — without ever leaving the office.

If you want to integrate social media into your CRM strategy, there are tools that can help. Technology is making it easier than ever to track key metrics and incorporate social media data into your customer service plans.

With certain CRM software, you can view the current happenings in your social circles and even predefine several actions based on certain triggers. For example, if somebody tweets your post or likes it on Facebook, your CRM can automatically tag that person, send him or her an email or start a whole new campaign, create a task, etc.

SHEA Global can help you find CRM technology for social media integration that’s right for your business. Contact us today to learn more. Visit SHEAGlobal.com or call 905-470-6830.

Discover more about how to integrate your CRM and social media with our free eBook, CRM Systems in the Social Media Age.