What is Social CRM? Definition, Benefits, and Tools
Customers remain the most important part of any brand. In 2024, social media is where 61 per cent of customer interactions take place.
Have you ever wondered what really makes a brand fly off on social media though? It’s the customers. But the real question is, how do you build a relationship with your customers?
You do it with the help of Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management). But what is Social CRM?
Social CRM in simple words is engaging and building a relationship with your customers on social media. How do you do it though?
Learn what social CRM is, its definition, benefits, and tools with this blog.
Table of Contents
What is Social CRM?
Social CRM, also called social customer Relationship Management is the process of building a relationship with your customers, by creating desired content, and actively interacting and engaging with them on social media. In 2024, social CRM is especially important, because of the extensive use of social media sites by today’s customers.
Let us understand what Social CRM is through an example:
A retail company called AestheticClothing wants to connect to its digital customer base. How can they do this with Social CRM?
They can use Social CRM to monitor and respond to what their customers are asking, interact with them on social media sites, and check and respond to the reviews that they are getting.
And it doesn’t end at this. They can further use Social CRM to measure their page’s analytics to find out what their customers are liking, and what they don’t, so the company can work on the dislikes and better their social media campaign.
What do social crm platforms have to offer?
Social CRM Platforms are a sub-tool offered by Social Media Management Tools and Social Listening Tools. The CRM Integration system in these tools is governed by the following features.
- Hashtag Tracking and Analysis
- Sentiment Analysis
- Competitor Insights
- Real-time Alerts (one of the most important features for brand-reputation management)
- Single-view Platform Dashboards
- Social Media Chatbots
- Social Media Analytics
- Brand-User Engagement Analysis
- Automated Data Processing
Traditional Vs. Social CRM
Sr. No. | Aspects | Traditional CRMÂ | Social CRMÂ |
1 | Interactions | Offline (Phone, emails, in-person) | Online (social media) |
2 | Tools | Databases, Softwares | Social media, ORM tools |
3 | Data Sources | Customer Databases, sales pipelines | Social media data, online interactions |
4 | Communication | One-way communication | Two-two communication |
5 | Measurement | Customer retention, sales | Social media engagement, sentiment analysis |
Traditional CRM is managing a brand’s customer relationships through a particular structure and data analysis. It makes use of databases and software to track how the customers interact with your brand, find out what needs improvement and then modify the marketing campaigns. It typically involves one-way communication as the brands do not directly interact with their customers here.
Social CRM on the other hand, maintains the customer relationship that you have with your audience on social media through various tools and software. Social CRM feels more personal to the customers and the interaction is more engaging. It makes use of your brand’s social media data to understand its audience better and serves them accordingly, based on their feedback and preferences. And the communication here is two-way as the brands themselves interact with the customers.
7 Benefits of Social CRM
1. Customer Engagement
2. Customer Service
3. Understanding of Customer's Needs
4. Brand Loyalty
5. Marketing Campaigns
6. Competitive Edge
7. Communication and Collaboration
The Top 3 Social CRM Platforms
1. Locobuzz
Locobuzz is a Social Media Management and Social Listening platform with a holistic Social CRM Platform integration system. It offers a single-view platform for Social Analytics and Brand-User Insights.
A Sentiment Analysis and Hashtag Tracker, helps you better understand your customers and thus build an improved Brand-User Engagement. Along with these features, it also offers you Competitor Insights and AI-Powered social media Chatbots to set your brand apart.
It strives to create a conversive, immersive, and engaging experience for both you and your audience. A Social CRM ecosystem in itself, it is the most opted for Social Listening Tool in the market today.
Locobuzz is also a leading social CRM and a unified customer experience (CX) tool that uses social listening and analytics to find out the digital position of your brand and maintain a relationship with your customers based on their reviews, activity, and interactions.
How Locobuzz works?
Gathers Data: Locobuzz gathers your brand’s social media page’s data, and its customer reviews on various sites to find out how your brand is doing and then manage its interactions across social media.
Customer Relationships: With its social listening and analytics, Locobuzz finds out the relationship a brand has with its customers.
Works with Existing CRMs: Locobuzz can also work with the CRM systems that Already exist within a brand and integrate itself to manage customer relationships.
Hassle-Free CRM: With Locobuzz, you can also connect the CRM for your social media page without any hassles, and the good thing is that you don’t even need to know coding to connect it. You can use CRM without any hassle and no prior coding experience for your brand.
Key Features
Social Listening: Track the conversations, mentions, and sentiment relating to your brand, competitors, and industry keywords.
Sentiment Analysis: Finds how happy or not happy the customers are and quite easily identifies any problems that could be turned into a crisis.
Engagement Management: Deals with the customer’s questions, comments, and messages professionally and efficiently
Competitor Analysis: Tracks what your competitor is up to on social media, their performance, and their online movements.
Influencer Marketing: Helps you discover and collaborate with those influencers who might eventually help you reach a more significant target audience.
Crisis Management: Manages negative sentiment and protects your reputation from any harm.
Reporting and Analytics: Provides detailed reports on the performance, engagement by the customers, and campaigns effectiveness.
Integration: As smooth integration with other marketing and CRM tools.
Benefits
Customer Satisfaction: Efficient and prompt response to queries by customers help them to have a good experience.
Brand Reputation: It captures and manages online reputation in protecting your brand image.
Increased Involvement: Reach your intended audience with relevant and timely content.
Data-Driven Decision Making: This shall be from the outcome of analytics generated in the site.
Elastic Workflow: Management of the social media processes will be elastic, saving more time.
Cost-Effective: Centralized management of social media will make use of only as many tools as possible.
Organizations will be able to deliver better customer experiences and reputations, and advance growth, in the hyper-competitive digital landscape, by leveraging Locobuzz’s capabilities.
2. Brand24
One of the more nominally priced tools available out there, Brand24 is known to stand right next in line after Locobuzz for its Social Listening sub-tools and categorical listing of mentions according to user sentiments.
Two main features of any Social CRM Platform are Sentiment Analysis and Hashtag Tracking, and Brand24 offers both of these in an utmost refined manner.
The dashboards created list these entries in terms of negative, positive, and neutral user sentiments, so it becomes easier for you to browse through them.
3. BrandMentions
BrandMentions is renowned as a multifaceted Social Monitoring Tool. Most well-known for its Social Analytics and comprehensive approach to Sentiment Analysis, it tracks user engagement with your brand and helps you strategically improve upon it.
Another feature that it is great for is the analytical listing of Competitor Brand Insights and Analytics. This helps you stay at par with competitor brands in the market, following through a healthy competitive spirit for brand management and sales growth.
The social CRM platforms on this list have been raved about by top brand users. Locobuzz’s Social CRM Integration has been consistently rated as a leader for Social Listening, Brand Management, and reputation building. Brand24 and BrandMentions stand right next in line with some of the most authentic and consistent results for Customer Relationship Management.
Why Should You Integrate Social CRM Platforms With Your Brand?
If that’s the question you have been pondering upon—we have the answer to your query. Here we have all the reasons why you should use them, as well as ways in which you can get the maximum out of these tools.
1. Improves brand reputation
Any brand that answers to user complaints in real-time has a higher Brand-Reputation, known to care for its users. With the help of sentiment analysis trackers and prioritized real-time alerts, you can cater to high-priority complaints and requests as soon as a complaint is raised.Â
This makes your brand stand out and improves your reputation among your competitors.
2. Higher Brand Reliability
When your content focuses on what users like; when you make adjustments according to your audience’s needs; and prioritize user insights, it is bound to develop an improved brand-user connect. Improved User-Brand Connect equals higher Brand Reliability.
Social Media Chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence imitate the feeling of human conversation, with faster-automated responses. These not only help you in automating product purchases and register user complaints but also makes users feel heard. This develops a feeling of mutual understanding between the brand and the user, thus retaining your audience’s trust.
3. Steady increase in sales growth and reduced expense cost
AI-powered social media chatbots enable automated product purchases. This means more orders can be placed in a shorter period of time via all social media platforms.Â
This automation also helps you cut back on up to 30% of employee management costs, which you otherwise might have spent on hiring customer service reps for answering to DMs and taking orders on Social Media Channels.
4. Enhanced brand engagement
Social CRM platforms give you analytics on your brand engagement. This helps you know better what your audience engages with the most, and what they engage with the least. This lets you create more engaging content for your brand while keeping in mind the things that are least engaging, that you should bar.
The Hashtag Trackers also give you a range of different hashtags to choose from among the most trending ones. Using these, your content can land on the feed of non-followers who might be interested in your work niche and could become potential customers.
Social Media Analytics reports also bring your attention to users’ most active and engaging hours on a certain platform. You can use this information to schedule your posts, reels, important announcements, and live streams.
5. Improves customer satisfaction and brand referrals
When a brand keeps its customers’ needs as priority and makes them feel heard, it improves Customer Satisfaction.Â
A good Social CRM Platform helps you do just that. It creates for you an ecosystem of sub-tools to cater to user needs in an improved fashion. The more satisfied your customers are, the more they talk about your brand in a positive light and fetch a high number of referred customers to your brand.
Discover how Locobuzz can elevate your customer engagement strategy, streamline social interactions, and drive business growth.
Case Study: The Green Owl's Personal Fan Club (DuoLingo)
Duolingo, famous for its green owl mascot is a language-learning software that lets you learn languages from all around the world for free. It was launched in 2011 by Luis von Ahn and Severin Hacker, and its mission was to make language learning easy and fun.
If you are a social media user, you have probably come across at least one picture or a meme relating to the green owl of Duolingo. Be it its own sassy social media account the ‘Free me from this green owl’ meme, or the sarcastic comments Duolingo has left its mark on social media and its audience. To date, you will find all of Duolingo’s social media accounts interesting and engaging, with sassy and funny comments and replies. But how did Duolingo build this relationship with its customers?
Starting of Duolingo’s Social Media
What made Duolingo different from other language learning apps was that it provides free language learning courses that they could use from anywhere and at any time.
And as the app quickly became popular and found a large audience of language learners, the app makers realized the value social media held. And they decided to build their community on social media.
Duolingo had its own social media page on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and they were quick to grab onto how the platforms worked and what really works on these platforms. It used these social media sites to connect with its audience personally and positioned its posts and content to be on a similar theme. They made good use of the memes generated for the green owl and adopted a quirky and sassy personality for its Audience. And that’s what kept the audience in.
Why Duolingo's Social CRM is the Best?
- Used Humor to Make People Learn: Duolingo’s social media posts are all full of humor, wit, and relatability. The page uses memes, jokes, and the latest gossip to talk with its customers and make them use its app.
- Turned the Broken Table Around (Fear of the Green Owl):
A while ago, the internet was filled with memes of the Green Owl, which was feared for forcing people to study or else- well you know how the meme goes!
Users used to repost memes with ‘Oh no I haven’t caught up with my German lessons. Gotta run or the bird might catch me.’
And what did Duolingo do?
It got in sync with its own meme and made it its personality. And that’s what attracted customers to it. - Fun & Interactive Page
If you ever visit any of Duolingo’s social media pages, you would be in for a surprise. Not only are the posts funny, quick, and gossipy, but they are also witty, playful, and creative. Not only that, but even the comments on their posts and their replies are hilarious. Like the recent Dua Linga meme when Dua came to visit India, or how to break your Duolingo streak without consequences with a mugshot of the green bird.
Duolingo’s social CRM strategy, like its witty, quick, sarcastic, consistent, and engaging social media pages is what helped the brand build a strong social media image. From growing its account by adapting to its own meme persona to still maintaining it with its quick and witty comments, Duolingo is one live example of why social CRM is important, and why customers like to stick with the Green Owl.
Conclusion
Living in a time when social media is where people spend most of their time in, it is a good way for brands to reach their business online. And they can do that with the help of Social CRM.
Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is how you engage with customers across social media pages and build strong relationships with them. You can build these relationships by monitoring your brand’s social media account, finding a unique USP for it, sticking with it, and engaging with your customers.
And this doesn’t just help your brand drive engagement but gives it a name among the audience, and differentiates it from your competitors.
By understanding your audience, giving them what they want on your page, and connecting with them on social media, you can easily grow your brand and its presence.
