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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we've ever used and we've used a lot.
8 seconds – that's the average attention span of a human. If you think that number is promising, know that a goldfish is said to have an attention span of 9 seconds. Not too hopeful now, are you? But wait, don't despair. With the right social media hooks, you can get...
Jun 26, 2025
Social CRM is your ticket to high-quality real-time engagement with customers, on the platforms where they already hang out. You’ll get solid data on behavior and sentiment with unprecedented granularity.
Social CRM tools empower sales and marketing teams to deliver a different level of customer support and to keep building towards that delight stage across social media platforms. These capabilities are particularly crucial in social media management tools for agencies that handle multiple client relationships simultaneously.
Social customer relationship management indexes data about your customers and potential customers on multiple social media platforms, plus every interaction that builds your relationship. It’s a tool that holds everything from contact information to personalized offers, sales, and service-related interactions.
Traditional CRM centralizes customer data from interactions in mediums that predate social media, like phone calls and emails. It’s driven by sales strategies and unifies information relayed between customer-facing departments (sales, marketing, customer service).
Social CRM developed following the rise of the “social customer”, once platforms like Facebook and Instagram surpassed email in terms of active users. This led to users being able to discuss brands outside brand channels.
Social customer relationship management is driven by engagement and integrates social media interactions, enabling real-time engagement and personalized communication.
The second isn’t here to replace the first; it’s a natural extension, and numerous companies use them together. Social CRM moves faster, is more user-centric, and its success is correlated with quality of content.
Ultimately, the scope of social CRM includes becoming a curator of multichannel digital experiences for the customer on brand-relevant social media platforms.
Here’s why social customer relationship management helps solidify customer retention, long-term:
It’s easier to control the quality and quantity of social media engagement when you have a granular view across channels. It’s also simpler to build lasting customer relationships. Working with more detailed metrics (likes, shares, reactions, comments, etc.) allows for better personalization with each message.
Etsy has a long history of bringing together communities of artists and communities of people who appreciate their craft. Lighthearted replies play a big part in a social media strategy that’s tailored precisely to their preferences.
Through repeated exposure to genuine, positive interactions with your brand, awareness shifts into loyalty. A large part of this comes down to addressing customer feedback and inquiries promptly. But it also includes small, low-stakes interactions that simply acknowledge the enthusiasm people might have for your brand.
Jewelry brand Mejuri knows the importance of these tiny acknowledgments and routinely connects with fans in the comment section.
Social CRM enables businesses to sort through and prioritize customer interactions. Filtering by sentiment means negative feedback or emergency situations can be dealt with first. More reliable social data means you see patterns over time. In turn, this means you can build targeted marketing campaigns or develop in-depth FAQs that anticipate customer needs.
Emily Berriman, CRM manager at StrategiQ, highlights the transformative power of this approach:
Social CRM tools enable businesses to monitor and respond quickly to customer complaints or questions on social channels, leading to faster resolution times and improved customer satisfaction. By layering social media into customer profiles, brands can gain immediate insights into customer preferences, issues, and trends, which allows for more responsive and informed decision-making.
Telecom operator Mint Mobile, for example, takes support via social media platforms one step further. Their main account often links to a different profile dedicated exclusively to customer service.
When all of the above add up, what you get is a healthier bottom line. Leads from various social media platforms, whether they come from posts, ads, or direct messages, can be managed from a single place. This stays true whether you’re growing a B2B or B2C brand.
Tablet brand reMarkable has gotten really good at cultivating demand. The comment sections of product-centric posts are full of people asking questions about features and generally planning a purchase or a gift.
The strategic integration of social data with content marketing amplifies these benefits even further. As Emily Berriman explains:
Social CRM also helps optimise content timing based on real-time engagement data, track sentiment to refine messaging, and spot influencers for collaboration. This integration creates a dynamic feedback loop where content continuously evolves based on real customer behavior, ultimately boosting engagement, loyalty, and ROI.
Regardless of industry or the size of your business, pick well-built social CRM tools that come with the features below. They’ll help you implement a customer relationship strategy that’s authentic to your long-term business goals.
If you’re starting from scratch, here’s how to ease your way into customer relationship management:
Your social CRM strategy, like almost any other kind of strategy, starts with specific goals. Such as:
Mapping out and prioritizing between goals will reveal whether you’re looking to use social CRM for sentiment analysis or if you’re going for more of a helpdesk vibe. Maybe you’re focusing on social commerce and social marketing. In this case, systematically tracking two-way customer interactions brings valuable insights into how customers help build a brand universe.
According to CRM manager, Emily Berriman, this integration creates powerful opportunities:
By analysing data and social insights in a unified platform, you can uncover trending topics, segment audiences for personalised messaging, and identify user-generated content to build trust and authenticity.
It becomes clear what features fast-track this process, which brings us to the next step.
The right CRM software aligns with your business needs. These features are also essential:
Planable does this and more: it helps teams manage customer relationships by housing the entire social media workflow. It’s built for collaboration, so everything from drafts to approvals has a dedicated space. On top of this, analytics cover in-depth insights for both audiences and content.
Planable’s analytics dashboard highlights your top content and audience engagement trends.
Add your brand’s social media accounts to the chosen platform, then configure what kind of data you want synchronized. Set up notifications to monitor brand mentions in real time.
To ensure consistency, establish a data cleansing and validation process. It’s also important to run tests and make sure customer data is being captured accurately.
As for operational efficiency, you improve it by focusing on two areas:
When staff are well-versed in using a new tool, you know it’s being used at full capacity and that errors stay at a minimum.
Map out a gradual process for getting the team involved and allow enough time for each stage. Make it clear how the new integration will ease their workload and improve their everyday processes.
As Emily Berriman emphasizes:
Social CRMs can enhance cross-channel collaboration by their unified customer view enabling teams, such as Social, Paid Media and CRM, to work from the same data, coordinate responses in real time, and deliver consistent, personalized experiences across departments.
You’ll want to allocate time for the technical side and allow people to test out the features they’ll be using. At least an equal period should be assigned for best practices when engaging with customers on social media.
Evaluating your social CRM strategy’s performance should be a continuous process. Schedule regular looks at how automations are performing, how metrics have evolved, and what issues have sprung up since the last update.
In addition to obvious KPIs like social media interactions and customer engagement, do a little qualitative research inside the organization. Include all the relevant team members and make space for them to flag challenges safely and honestly.
Most importantly, allow for input on how new tools have influenced the nature and quality of customer interactions. Sometimes, only a seasoned social media manager can really put data in context (so informed optimization is even smoother).
While social CRM offers powerful benefits, implementing it successfully means addressing these key challenges:
Use antivirus tools, consider protection for your team members’ devices, and implement an organization-wide firewall. A well-informed IT manager can keep an eye on secure software installations and help you outline a reasonable security budget.
Prioritize depending on urgency and sentiment by using filters. Automate everything you can so that you address customer concerns promptly, but in a way that’s authentic to the brand.
Create a brand manual that includes voice and tone guidelines, plus plenty of examples. Develop scripts for the most frequent customer service interactions and make sure they’re accessible to the social media team. Keep messaging personalized and tailored to audience segments, then tweak as you go by analyzing social media data.
Here are some of the best-rated social CRM tools out there:
Planable is a friendly, intuitive social media management platform centered around collaboration. It lets teams plan, create, organize, approve, and monitor all kinds of written content, on and off the socials.
Here’s how it helps you step up your social CRM game:
Schedule and manage posts across all platforms in one unified calendar view.
Monitor top metrics and trends to guide your content strategy.
Best For: Marketing teams, agencies, and brands looking for a collaborative content planning workflow with light social engagement management.
Sprout Social is a robust social media software for customer care and publishing, complete with social listening tools.
It uses a unified social inbox that shows influencer indicators and VIP lists, while its suite of social commerce solutions simplifies the purchasing process. It’s especially powerful for identifying prominent creators in your niche and vetting their brand fit.
Best For: Agencies and enterprise-level businesses that want to focus on community management and expand into influencer marketing.
Oktopost is a social media tool created especially for B2B marketers. It’s focused primarily on LinkedIn and offers solutions tailored by industry (tech, business services, legal, and manufacturing).
Its social CRM allows users to see interaction histories and provide personalized customer experiences. Custom tags allow for measuring and tracking conversations. Smart filters also help with prioritizing the most important interactions.
Best For: B2B brands that want to integrate social media with every department in the organization and include employee advocacy.
The more you think about it, the more sense it makes: why not integrate social media into customer relationship management? Social commerce has been at the forefront of sales strategies almost regardless of industry, for ages. Social CRM tools help you meet people where they are, promptly and effectively, but also give you an unprecedented insight into their psyche.
Sign up for a free trial with Planable and see just how smooth the process can be.
Irina is a freelance conceptual copywriter with an ethical edge and an advertising agency background. If she’s not rummaging for good synonyms, she’s probably watching a sitcom or listening to radio dramas with plucky amateur detectives. She loves collage, doing crosswords on paper and shazamming the birds outside her window.
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