Posted by Ever since Social Media became the preferred method for customers to get their issues resolved, there has been a significant rise in the addition of social media features on CRM software and also in Social Media Management Tools
Both the CRM software and the Social Tool each have their own pros and cons. CRM software basically started off as a ticketing tool to track customer issues and their resolutions. As the years progressed, the software also offered various integrations and introduced CRM metrics of various kinds. After the importance of social media grew, there were tools to help make publishing easier. These helped with creating and scheduling content and eventually these tools also featured CRM for socials.
In this article, I’ll be listing CRM tools and also Social Media Management tools that allow you to interact with your customers from all social channels in one dashboard.
CRM Softwares
These softwares are majorly used for other purposes such as sales tools, email ticketing tools, and overall business solutions. The social media CRM features are an added bonus.
12. Freshworks
Freshworks, formerly known as Freshdesk, is an easy-to-use CRM and sales software. For CRM purposes, they have email ticketing, chat and messengers, cloud telephony, web, and self-service, and they also have social media integrations. They also have a listening tool for Twitter that they call the social signals monitor. It sends you a notification about important tweets. On their dashboard, they have multiple filters that can help you quickly respond to tickets based on the channel of origin. Their other filters also include tags, status, priority, etc.
11. Zendesk
Zendesk provides products related to customer communication, including CRM and sales. They also have a unified agent workspace and you can respond to all your social comments and DMs from here. Zendesk is also a widely used software and has a very user-friendly interface. They also have built-in intelligence that can escalate issues to the agent best suited to help.
10. Zoho
This SaaS has a ton of web-based business tools. Zoho CRM is majorly tailored for sales but their Omnichannel feature gives you access to a shared dashboard for all your social media conversations. They support all mainstream channels but the most popular ones on Zoho are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The UI here is also very smooth and easy to navigate through.
9. LiveAgent
LiveAgent has a universal inbox for all connected social channels. You can choose triggers and conditions to automate the routing and assigning among agents. If you use this software as a complete business solution, your agents will also be able to assign tickets to other departments if needed. They also have the option to add tags, statuses, and priorities to the tickets.
8. Simplify360
Simplify 360 is a ticketing system that shares its inbox with social media channels as well. Once you integrate your support email and all your social channels, you’ll be able to reply to comments and messages along with replying to messages. They have an in-built AI-based routing system that will assign the tickets to your agents. You can also automate certain responses for recurring issues.
7. Salesforce
Salesforce is a widely used software for CRM. Its integrations and UI for every feature are very smooth and easy to understand. The feature they have for social CRM is called The Salesforce Social Studio. Here you can respond to comments and messages from all your social channels that you’ve connected. In their service console, you can view tickets or cases using different filters. There are case numbers, channels, status, priority, and date/time.
Social Media Management tools
These software and tools were created to make a social media manager’s job easier. They had to include publishing, listening, analytics, and social CRM as well to make sure all the bases on the social front are covered.
6. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a full-featured social media management tool. You can tackle CRM on Agorapulse using their Social Media Inbox product/feature. In this Inbox, you can organize, manage, and assign all tickets. The tickets include comments and messages as well. You can also sync your Facebook and Instagram ad comments to make sure you’re not missing out on anything. Along with inbox filters and saved replies, they also have a one-click translations feature.
5. Sproutsocial
While Sproutsocial is also a full-featured social media management kit, its main focus is on analytics and social listening. That said, they do have a unified inbox to tackle social CRM. They have message spike alerts that notify you when the volume of messages increases. This can give you some time to prepare and arrange for resources to avoid any backlog. They have customizable filtering options and you can easily route incoming messages to the designated agents.
4. Social Pilot
This is an all-in-one social marketing platform. They have a social inbox that supports Facebook, Instagram, and also the Google Business inbox. You can use the available filter to prioritize what you need to work on first. You have access to use images, gifs, and text to respond to your customer queries. The UI is very simple and you’ll be able to get around pretty easily.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most used social media management tools. They also have a unified social inbox where you can get access to all comments and DMs from your connected social channels. You can use the filters to bulk-dismiss messages that don’t need a response or to prioritize messages that need to be looked into as soon as possible. The interface is user-friendly and they also have integrations with Salesforce and Zendesk to make your social and email CRM easy.
2. Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool famously used by small businesses. They support Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Along with scheduling and publishing, they also prioritize customer engagement. Under their Engagement tab, you’ll be able to view and filter things like ‘Unanswered Comments’ for Instagram. (Which also shows up in the familiar Grid View) You will get notifications for urgent and important messages based on machine learning.
1. Crowdfire
Crowdfire is best known for its scheduling, publishing, social listening, and analytics features. They also have a social engagement feature called Crowdfire Mentions. They can fetch mentions and tags from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram comments, and DMs. Here you can filter by any of these platforms and sources and you can also filter the pending conversations. Replies can consist of saved replies, gifs, text, emojis, and images. They also have keyboard shortcuts to mark conversations as open, closed, or pending and also show you the character count for your replies.
Selecting a software or tool will mostly depend on the size of your business and what your main focus is.
If you’re a bigger business that’s already well established in social circles, your main focus will most likely be new products and customer retention. A CRM software will help you better than social media management tools.
But if you’re a small budding business and are relying on social content marketing it would make sense to go for a social media management tool since all your work would happen on that one app.
That’s all folks!