To truly get to the hearts—and minds—of your audience, you need something crucial: data—and plenty of it. That’s why the most successful businesses are those that leverage a solid customer relationship management (CRM) system. Acting as a goldmine of customer-related information, a well-designed and managed CRM can supercharge your relationships with your customers.

Do you already use one? Fantastic, but what if we told you that there’s another little piece of data equipment that you might need to add to your arsenal? We’re talking about social CRM. Not quite sure what it is, what it does, and why you should have one? Keep reading.

What is social CRM?

Before we jump into the how and why of a social CRM, it’s essential to define the what. So, what is a social CRM, exactly? As the name itself suggests, a social CRM is simply an extension of a standard CRM that helps businesses focus on gathering customer-related data via social media networks.

By doing so, companies that are active on channels like TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and more can keep a close eye on customer needs and wants. This enhances customer interactions and boosts crucial aspects such as loyalty, retention, and competitiveness.

Ultimately, all the data gathered through a social CRM enables businesses to craft, develop, and implement social-oriented marketing strategies that have a much higher chance of success.

From tracking individual customer interactions to monitoring the performance of a social campaign, and from responding to customer queries on-the-fly to checking brand mentions and sentiments across social platforms, a social CRM is a no-brainer.

Differences between traditional CRM and social CRM

Before exploring the difference between these two types of CRMs, let’s quickly recap what a traditional CRM is and what it does. Typically, a standard CRM handles things such as:

• Customer data management
• Customer interactions
• Sales and marketing process tracking
• Customer data analytics

As you can see, the potential of a classic CRM is already huge—still, it won’t be enough on its own to provide the in-depth, granular, and real-time insight you need if most of your customer interactions happen on social media.

Just consider a very common example: one of your business phone systems customers is trying to switch to a different membership plan, but your website keeps crashing, and they are unable to complete the transaction. Once upon a time, they would likely give your customer service team a call, whereas now they often go straight to social media to complain.

With a traditional CRM, you simply won’t be able to log and track these types of interactions, which is one of the reasons why you need a CRM that’s specifically geared toward social media platforms.

Now, to understand the differences between a standard CRM and a social one, let’s take a look at how each works across some business-critical areas.

Sales

Unlike a traditional CRM, which collects and analyzes customer data to build strategies aimed at a specific target audience, a social CRM is more interested in building an authentic rapport with customers (and potential ones) on a more individual, personalized, and real-time level.

Marketing

A standard CRM focuses on more traditional marketing approaches, such as direct ads, in order to promote products or services and drive new sales. On the other hand, a social CRM puts the customers in the driving seat, letting them engage in—and, often, even spark—conversation and interaction.

Customer service and support

If you only operate a standard CRM, you’ll usually be tied to standard working hours for your customer service and support teams. Essentially, if a customer has a query or complaint when none of your agents is available, they will need to wait, which causes frustration and anger. With a social CRM, you can address customer queries as they come through, at any time, allowing you to engage with them swiftly and bring any issues to a prompt resolution.

Customer feedback and reviews

Another important aspect of any CRM is what customers feel and say about your brand. If you only leverage a classic CRM, you’ll typically have to ask for reviews and feedback directly, in the hope that your customers might have the time and willingness to share their experiences with the wider world. 

However, as we already mentioned, customers today are much more likely to take to social media when they want to express their opinions on brands and their products/services. Using a social CRM can allow you to monitor posts about your company, analyze the underlying sentiment, and take rapid action if you are starting to spot any potential issues.

It’s also worth noting that a growing number of businesses have begun integrating affiliate email software with their social CRM to strengthen their outreach strategies. This combination enables companies to streamline both social media interactions and email marketing campaigns, ensuring that no customer touchpoint is missed.

Social CRM: The main benefits

Let’s now quickly look at the main benefits of running a social CRM.

It lets you get to know your customers in-depth

Want to really know what your customers think about you and what they want and need from your brand? A social CRM can give you all the answers you need through comprehensive data about customer preferences, buying habits, behaviors, and sentiments.

It boosts your customer service and support

As we have seen earlier, a delayed, complicated process to put through a customer query or complaint can only exacerbate an already delicate situation. With a social CRM on hand, though, you are in the best position to respond to your customers quickly and in a personalized way, avoiding possible backlash or other issues and protecting your brand reputation.

It fosters stronger, cross-team collaboration

Sales and marketing should never work in silos—for great results, they should align as part of an enterprise architecture (FEA). And that’s exactly what a social CRM lets you do, by sharing the insights collected through social media interactions with a wide range of teams. 

It helps you save money

Traditional marketing and advertising methods are not only less effective than digital ones, but they are also more costly. Social media marketing is the ultimate in both marketing effectiveness and cost-efficiency, which is yet another reason that a social CRM is so crucial.

It boosts your sales

Through a masterful use of social media, you can engage followers and turn them into loyal customers, fans, and advocates. As one of the best sales prospecting tools, social CRM helps you with this through personalized tips and recommendations, high-quality lead generation and nurturing, and more targeted and relevant deals and promotions.

It sharpens your competitive edge

Lastly, all the benefits we spoke about so far can only lead us to an obvious result: better competitiveness for your business. With a social CRM, in fact, you’ll be able to save money, supercharge your campaigns, and build authentic customer relationships, which, ultimately, will allow you to outperform your rivals.

8 Ways social CRM boosts your online marketing

Now, it should be clear what a social CRM is, how it differs from a standard CRM, and what its main benefits are. But how, exactly, is this handy little tool going to help you supercharge your online marketing efforts?

Keep reading to find out eight ways in which social CRM done right lets you achieve just that.

Analyzes customer interactions to create targeted campaigns

First of all, what is data good for if you let it sit there to gather digital dust? Regardless of how much and what type of data you collect, if you want to extract actionable insights from it, you’ll need to analyze it.

A social CRM is the perfect way to enable this. By collecting and analyzing information from your customer interactions on social media, you’ll be able to understand what people want, need, and expect from your brand. The bottom line? You’ll succeed at designing and launching campaigns that truly hit the mark.

With Sotrender’s Ads Optimization, this process becomes even more powerful. By leveraging advanced algorithms trained on vast amounts of social media data, Sotrender helps marketers fine-tune their ad targeting, audience selection, and budget allocation. This ensures your campaigns are not only based on solid customer insights but are also optimized for maximum performance, leading to better results with lower costs.

Fosters stronger customer relationships and boosts engagement

Sharing genuine relationships with brands is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s a must. Most customers, in fact, particularly Gen Z and Millennials, value authenticity above all else, meaning that if a company sounds or looks “fake” or its messaging feels forced, they likely won’t waste time engaging with it (let alone buying from it).

So, use your social CRM to build the foundation of those meaningful connections with your social media followers. How? Engage, engage, engage! Respond to comments, like posts, share UGC, and generally, just do your best to create a sense of community on your social pages.

Identifies potential leads by analyzing social media activities

These days, lead generation happens in the most unlikely of places—and that includes social media, too. These platforms are a real treasure trove of data that, when analyzed correctly with the aid of a good social CRM, can help you spot any potential leads.

These tools track mentions, likes, shares, comments, and more, highlighting any follower who might be on the verge of converting into a paying customer.

Streamlines communication by responding to inquiries effectively

Suppose you run a PaaS business (read this for some PaaS examples) with a solid presence on Facebook and LinkedIn. If one of your customers experiences a problem with your services, they can reach out to you directly on your social media pages, where you can engage in a real-time, efficient, and productive conversation to help fix their issue. How do you do all this? With a social CRM, of course.

Improves customer service by providing timely responses

As a follow-up to our previous point, when you succeed at intervening rapidly before a small hiccup escalates into something more damaging for your business, you are in a much better position to provide consistently excellent customer service. A social CRM lets you respond to your customer queries at lightning-fast speed, which enables you and your customer service and support agents to fix any issues rapidly and efficiently.

Allows businesses to make informed and data-driven decisions

For any modern business operating across industries and geographies, data is vital. Imagine what you could achieve by tracking, storing, analyzing, and regularly accessing customer data from your social media pages.

Well, out of the many things you could accomplish, one is certainly worth mentioning: a much more profitable, data-driven business strategy—and one that you can continue to refine and improve as you keep collecting information from your social channels.

Enhances marketing effort impact by addressing customer needs

As we have mentioned, a social CRM allows you to really zoom in on your customer needs and address them in almost real-time. So, if you know what your customers like, need, and want, you’ll be halfway to delivering it to them.

Perhaps, findings from your social CRM have highlighted that influencer content is particularly popular with your Instagram audience. To capitalize on this, work on expanding your influencer marketing efforts on the platform, and see reach, engagement, and conversions soar.

Builds trust and fosters brand loyalty through consistent interactions

At the end of the day, we are all people. None of us is particularly keen to part with our hard-earned money, but things can be made more pleasant if we have a trustworthy, authentic rapport with the brand we are buying from.

With a social CRM, you can maintain a consistent and cohesive presence across all the social media networks where you interact with your customers, demonstrating to them that you are a credible, reliable, and committed brand. And when customers have proof that you are worth their money, they will keep coming back to you, time and again.

Conclusion

As we have discussed in this article, not only is a social CRM quite different from a conventional one, but it’s also necessary if a big chunk of your brand’s online interactions with customers happen on social media networks. So, don’t hesitate to add a social CRM extension to your main CRM platform, and you’ll soon benefit from higher engagement, better-quality leads, fewer costs, and a boost in competitiveness and revenues.