What is Social CRM Software? Definition, Features, and Benefits

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Did you know that businesses can drastically increase their customer loyalty and boost sales revenues using social CRM software? In one survey conducted by Salesforce, social media CRM software users experienced a 54% increase in sales revenue and a 55% growth in customer loyalty. However, some businesses still don’t know what social CRM software is or the benefits of using it.

In this blog post, you will find all the answers to the questions you might have in mind, such as what is social CRM software. What are the best features of social CRM tools? And what are the top benefits of social CRM software?

Social CRM meaning, by definition, is a method or advanced technology app that allows companies to engage with customers and potential customers over diverse social media channels.

In simple words, social customer relationship management or social CRM software are online solutions that integrate various social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (X), into CRM systems.

The main purpose of integrated social CRM tools is to bridge the gap between businesses and customers so they can interact directly with each other on popular social media platforms. Social CRM systems include many fascinating features, such as social media campaign management, instant feedback, and integrations.

Social CRM vs Traditional CRM

Before exploring how social CRM differs from traditional CRM software, let’s see their meaning:

Social CRM tools are developed to build and maintain healthy social relationships with potential customers before sales through networking channels like Twitter and Facebook. They are also popular for interacting and engaging with current customers on social networking platforms, providing them with convenient customer support services.

› Traditional CRM

Traditional CRM software systems are more focused on increasing business sales. They include top-notch features that enable businesses to swiftly move customers through the sales pipeline to close deals. Traditional CRMs are more business-centric and are most preferred for performing crucial business operations like automating workflows, executing marketing campaigns, and monitoring customers’ activities.

1) Sales

Social CRM software provides an environment where businesses can directly approach potential clients to interact and engage with them. Traditional CRM is more about gathering and studying customer data so that businesses can develop effective sales strategies for target audiences.

2) Marketing

In social CRM, customers are in full control. They are the ones who engage with each other regarding your brand. Here, you can take part in conversations and attract new leads via interactions. In traditional CRM, businesses leverage classic marketing methods, such as paid advertising and bulk email sending, to attract potential customers and win new deals.

3) Customer Support

Social CRM software solutions are more customer-centric in terms of customer support services. Customers can instantly begin communication, highlighting their concerns via social networking platforms. Social CRM tools allow businesses to promptly respond to those concerns with instant interactions. Most traditional CRM tools usually follow business hours for customer service. Customers can only interact and communicate with customer service representatives within business hours.

Social CRM Features

The following are the 7 best features of social media CRM platforms:

1. Customer Profiles

Social CRM platforms allow businesses to collect customer details, such as their names, demographic details, locations, job titles, education levels, hobbies, and more, from different social media platforms. This helps businesses create comprehensive customer profiles from which they can get an overview and get to know their customers and their needs on a different level.

It's one of the most robust features of social CRM solutions. It works by sending businesses alerts/notifications whenever their brand name is mentioned over integrated social media platforms. This enables businesses to find new leads and gain insights into what consumers are thinking about their brand.

One of the key features of social CRM software is the ability to seamlessly integrate with various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Businesses can promptly engage with their customers and also track, monitor, and record their activities on these platforms. What’s more, they can store all customer data in one centralized database for easy and secure access.

Social selling is also one of the many eye-catching features of social CRM tools. Nowadays, social media platforms are more than just tools for staying in touch with loved ones. With more than 5 billion people using social media platforms worldwide, it's like a holy grail for businesses to find new sales opportunities.

Thanks to social CRM, businesses can take customers and leads straight to their business websites and boost sales by leveraging social media platforms.

This feature is considered one of the top options for marketing teams. They can plan, create, execute, and monitor social campaigns on different social networking sites. Marketing teams can also track how social media marketing campaigns are performing using various metrics and make necessary changes if required.

6. Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis, also known as emotion AI, is one of the cool features of social CRM tools that businesses use to identify customer sentiment and the reason behind online posted comments (positive or negative) on social media platforms.

The tools use natural language processing (NLP) to determine the customers' emotions. This will help businesses promptly tackle negative comments about their services or products before they go viral.

7. Instant Feedback System

This is also one of the essential features of social CRM software. Using this software, businesses allow their customers and potential customers to give instant feedback on their products or services. Businesses can take this customer feedback as new opportunities to enhance their product and service offerings to meet customer needs.

Recommended: 5 Ways to Get More Customer Feedback

Social CRM Benefits

There are plenty of benefits to using social media CRM software. Among them, below are the 7 best benefits of social CRM software that might be worth your while:

1. Increased Sales

Social media platforms can work like a charm for businesses when it comes to maximizing sales. With social selling best practices, sales teams can identify high-quality leads that can be easily converted into paying customers, which can lead to increased sales.

Let’s dive into the following figures for a better understanding:

Research from LinkedIn shows that 78% of businesses that leverage social selling can surpass businesses that do not. Additionally, as per HubSpot’s sales report, over 55% of sales professionals have used various social media platforms to find new leads. These social networking sites are:

Social Media Table

One study found that the average person uses around 6 different social platforms per month. Another shows that the online time spent by usual internet users is 6 hours and 40 minutes each day.

Given this, leveraging social CRM tools to manage social business profiles and engage with potential customers over the Internet has become a necessity in this digital-first era. To fulfill this primary requirement of every business, social CRM solutions offer flawless social media integration support.

This allows businesses to seamlessly integrate with various social platforms and manage & maintain their numerous social media profiles from one location, eliminating the need for unnecessary back-and-forth between multiple social networking sites.

Social media CRM software solutions incorporate many top-level features that allow companies to monitor customer activities and collect crucial customer data, such as time spent on specific product pages, click-through rates, number of online visitors, and more.

Businesses can analyze these data to surface hidden trends and gain crucial customer insights, which helps them create and sustain healthy social relationships with leads and customers.

4. Increased Customer Engagement

This is one of the great benefits of using social customer relationship management tools for businesses. The solutions enable companies to stay active on different social media platforms and let them directly interact and engage with customers. In social CRM software, customers are in full control. Businesses can share topics, post content, run contests, and do other like-related activities to attract customers and leads.

Furthermore, businesses allow consumers and prospects to like, share & comment on topics, initiate discussions, participate in contests, and perform other types of interactions to boost customer engagement.

5. Deep Customer Insights

One of the crucial benefits of social CRM is the ability to gain in-depth customer insights. Businesses can leverage social CRM's latest analytical abilities to analyze raw customer data and convert it into actionable information.

Social CRM software tools empower businesses to efficiently track, monitor, and collect social platform-related customer data like preferences, behaviors, and sentiments. This data will help businesses to create effective marketing strategies. Additionally, companies can monitor comprehensive social media interactions to understand customer pain points and facilitate them with more personalized advertisements and targeted offerings.

6. Enhanced Customer Support

According to Oracle, 75% of users expect a response to their social-generated queries in under 5 minutes, or they might lose interest and leave your brand. Hence, it is vital for businesses to not only proactively manage their social media profiles but also respond quickly to social-generated customer queries.

Social CRM software offers various robust features like sentiment analysis, social listening, and instant feedback systems that businesses can leverage to enhance their customer support. Companies can leverage these features to receive instant notifications as soon as their brand names are mentioned on social media websites.

Plus, all the social media platforms are integrated into one system, so companies can give responses to multiple social platforms from a single location.

7. Improved Customer Experience

Social CRM tools provide many top-notch features like feedback collection, analytical abilities, and detailed reporting. These features help businesses gather valuable customer insights like customers’ opinions about products, buying patterns, and more. Additionally, social media CRM software tools allow companies to monitor crucial metrics, such as click-through rates, conversions, engagement rates, and more.

Using these insights, coupled with crucial metrics, businesses can identify what’s working and what’s not. This will help businesses optimize their products & services and make them more personalized to improve overall customer experience.

» In Summary

With the increasing number of social media users around the world, more and more businesses, regardless of their verticals, have started using social CRM software to interact and engage with their customers and prospects on their choice of social platforms.

Social CRM tools are equipped with top features, and businesses are leveraging them to improve customer experience, find new sales opportunities, grow ROI, provide better customer support services, and more.

If you are still not using a social CRM tool to manage your business’s social media profile, you might be losing to your competitors. So, are you ready to power up your business with the best social media CRM software?