If you have a dozen people working full-time to monitor and engage social media for your company, you are wasting time and money. Social CRM solutions are becoming increasingly sophisticated and can save your company a huge amount of resources and headache in your social media interactions.

Customer relationship management (CRM) has been around in one form or another for a long time. Companies have tracked customer information, inquiries, and service requests on paper or by using software. However, as social media becomes increasingly important, social CRM applications become a must-have for success.

Millions of tweets, blog posts, and forum discussions occur every day. You already know that to be successful in business, you can’t just interact with the customers who have contacted you. You have to be proactive, monitor what is being said about your industry, and join the conversations. However, getting it done can be a challenge. This is where a social CRM solution can really shine.

Benefits of Social CRM Applications

There are a wide variety of social CRM solutions available. Some are platform specific, such as Hootsuite social media dashboard, and others have an all-in-one approach, such as Social CRM from Salesforce. Generally, the more comprehensive the application, the more benefits you gain.

• Listen to the Right Conversations. You know that hearing what your customer has to say is key. The challenge can be getting relevant information from all the conversations – and a good social CRM application will make this easy, allowing filtering by keyword and industry. This allows you to focus your efforts without sifting through a lot of irrelevant media.
• Gain Insight into Trends. Beyond simply hearing your customers, you want to be able to measure and quantify what you hear. A social CRM solution will allow you to track sentiment, trends, and mentions across a range of social media outlets. This data can be very important in directing marketing initiatives and customer service projects. The success of these plans can be part of your ROI for social media engagement.
• Engage Your Customers Efficiently. After you’ve listened, you want to engage customers and prospects by answering questions and concerns, offering information, and participating in their conversations about your company and industry. A social CRM application will make it easy to schedule tweets, blog posts, and forum entries so that you don’t have to be on social media all day in order to participate.
• Create Custom Reports. Justifying and quantifying social media involvement to others in the organization can be a difficult thing to do. A quality social CRM application will allow you to create custom reports and visualizations that will share your social insights throughout the company.

Social media engagement is often viewed as something that takes a dozen people working full-time to keep up with and brings questionable ROI. With a good social CRM application, you can shatter that myth and show your organization the true value of efficient social media engagement.

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