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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we've ever used and we've used a lot.
Watching metrics like a hawk speeds up your decision-making process. Getting a good handle on social media metrics means illuminating audience behavior and preferences. You measure the impact of each new iteration of a social strategy but also make data-driven...
Aug 21, 2025
Ever found yourself drowning in comments, DMs, and mentions across every social platform your brand uses? You’re trying to build relationships with customers, but managing conversations while keeping your content strategy on track feels impossible.
Traditional CRMs work great for sales teams, but what about when your customer relationships happen in Instagram comments and Twitter replies? That’s where social CRM software comes in, turning every social interaction into a relationship-building opportunity.
Today, we’re breaking down what social CRM really is, the must-have features that matter, and which social media collaboration tools work best for content-focused teams. Ready to turn those overwhelming social conversations into your biggest advantage? Let’s dive in.
Social CRM software is where customer relationship management meets real-time conversations on social media. Unlike traditional CRMs built for leads and sales teams, a social CRM empowers you to track, manage, and respond to social media interactions across marketing campaigns. Think comments, DMs, mentions, UGC, and feedback at scale.
If you’re working in an agency setting, know that a social CRM empowers businesses to manage customer relationships for multiple clients and accounts at once.
Your social customer relationship management tool must match the pace and complexity of modern content operations. Start looking for tools with:
You want visibility across campaigns, channels, and formats. One place where you can map a product launch, spot gaps in your posting rhythm, and keep client work separated without mental gymnastics.
Comments, multi-level approvals, user permissions, version history, they all matter in social media marketing.
To enhance customer relationships, you’ll need more than just replying to comments. Look for a social media CRM that can help your team manage, label, and close conversations.
These days, everyone’s social media presence is scattered across multiple platforms. Look for a social CRM tool that can help you manage all major social media channels. Think Threads, Pinterest, and Google Business too. If your audience is there, your CRM should be as well.
If you want to run a full-scale social media strategy, you should be able to draft and approve everything from tweets to event descriptions and YouTube Shorts in one workflow.
You want social media insights that help you optimize campaigns, prove ROI, spot patterns, and repeat what works. You also need fast answers to what’s stalling and why.
If it takes a complex walkthrough to figure out how to schedule posts, your team won’t use it. Custom views, saved filters, fast navigation, easy tagging, and good on-page support are essential.
Here’s a curated list of social CRM tools aimed at social media and content-focused teams:
Planable is a social CRM platform for marketers, agencies, and content teams who prioritize collaboration and clear workflows over traditional sales pipelines. If you’re managing multiple brands or clients and need a centralized hub for planning, feedback, and publishing, Planable ticks these boxes.
Let’s explore the features that make Planable a proper tool to maximize your customer relationship management strategies.
Planable’s marketing calendar offers a visual, drag-and-drop interface that supports 9 major social media platforms: Instagram, Threads, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, and Google Business Profile.
Each workspace has its own dedicated calendar – ideal for different clients or brands. You can color-code campaigns and filter by content type or platform.
Planable’s collaborative workspace allowing real-time content feedback and asset suggestions between team members.
Collaboration is at the heart of Planable. Team members can leave real-time comments, internal-only notes, and annotations directly on posts. Every post maintains its own activity history for better transparency and accountability.
Planable’s approval workflow setup allowing multi-level content reviews across team and client roles.
Here’s how Planable’s approval workflow works:
Planable is rolling out a unified inbox that helps teams manage customer interactions across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, all from a single engagement dashboard.
You’ll be able to reply to comments, track customer conversations’ status, and promptly address customer concerns without switching tools.
With this social media integration, you can support your relationship-building while growing brand loyalty and customer retention through micro-interactions.
Planable’s analytics dashboard visualizing social growth, audience demographics, and engagement trends.
Planable’s analytics dashboard helps you gain valuable insights into content performance, audience behavior, and post trends, rather than basic likes and views.
You can monitor what resonates, spot patterns in customer behavior, and start analyzing social media data to inform your next move.
And if you connect social data with your content workflows, you’ll be able to build marketing strategies that better match customer expectations.
Planable offers a free plan with 50 posts, a Basic plan at $33/month with 60 posts/workspace, and a Pro plan at $49/month with 150 posts/workspace. Enterprise plans include more advanced features.
Planable currently lacks built-in social listening features and CMS publishing integrations. However, its focus on content collaboration and approval workflows makes it a robust social CRM for content-focused teams.
While traditional CRM platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce are built for sales teams tracking leads and pipelines. Planable focuses on helping content-first teams build lasting customer relationships through consistent, well-managed social media engagement and content collaboration.
Here’s what sets it apart:
Planable lets you manage newsletters, press releases, Stories, carousels, and more, all in one place – perfect if your customer relationship management strategies are rooted in thoughtful, multi-platform storytelling.
Multi-level, internal, and client-facing approvals with no login required. This prevents bottlenecks and keeps content moving in the right direction.
That includes Threads, X, and Google Business Profile. This is useful, as most tools still don’t support all major social media channels.
Not built around sales pipelines but around relationship building, team collaboration, and fast feedback, AKA the real drivers of loyal customers.
Most CRMs ignore the mobile experience. Planable’s iOS/Android app makes it easy to approve, comment, or tweak a post while on the go.
If your team’s day-to-day includes approvals, content planning, and publishing across various social media platforms, Planable addresses these social CRM challenges and simplifies your work. It fits into workflows focused on building relationships, not chasing leads.
Planable isn’t built for sales pipelines, lead scoring, or marketing automation. If you need a full sales CRM or “set it and forget it” campaigns, consider HubSpot or Salesforce instead.
Planable may just be the missing piece in your social CRM system. Try it and get 50 posts for free.
Sprout Social CRM visualizing sentiment scores, engagement trends, and user queries for social strategy.
Sprout Social offers an infrastructure layer for marketing and customer experience teams managing brand conversations at scale. Think of it as a full-suite social CRM system built to support customer relationship management strategies.
The platform helps teams:
The Smart Inbox consolidates messages, comments, reviews, and DMs across all major social media channels, then layers on tagging, sentiment detection, and assignment workflows.
It uses AI-backed tools to detect intent, prioritize messages, and address customer concerns promptly.
Sprout’s social listening and sentiment tools surface real-time shifts in tone, trending pain points, and social media mentions across platforms.
It’s got CRM-style contact profiles, review management, and integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and help desk tools.
Pricing starts at $199/month per seat for the Standard plan, with advanced engagement and analytics features unlocked at $399/month. No free plan, but a 30-day trial is available.
Sprout Social has a premium price point. Content publishing is solid, but the platform is more structured around social care than creative collaboration.
HubSpot CRM interface displaying contact data, recent activity, and customer communication history.
HubSpot is a multifunctional platform that connects marketing, sales, and customer service. Its Smart CRM is particularly valuable for anyone who aims for context-rich communication and customer timelines. But make no mistake: this is still a sales-first CRM that’s retrofitted with social features, not built around creative collaboration.
Hubspot can:
HubSpot’s free plan is available for up to 2 users. Starter plans begin at approx. €15/month. Advanced CRM functionality (including reporting, automation, and social scheduling) comes with higher-tier plans, starting from €792/month.
HubSpot is built for lead pipelines, not content pipelines. Creative workflows and content scheduling are functional but minimal. Content teams can outgrow them quickly without additional tools.
Zoho’s business suite offering CRM, mail, desk, books, and recruiting tools for workplace productivity.
Zoho CRM sits in a sweet spot for small businesses looking to centralize customer data, manage social interactions, and keep costs low. It’s not a content tool, but it does allow you to monitor brand mentions, messages, and engagement.
Here’s what it offers:
Zoho CRM starts at €14/user/month (Standard plan), then goes up to €23 for the Professional and €40 for the Enterprise plans. A free edition is available for up to 3 users.
Zoho’s strength lies in workflows and affordability, not in creative collaboration or native scheduling. Content-focused teams will still need an external calendar or publishing tool to support more marketing and business functions.
Salesforce CRM platform showing sentiment analysis tools and social engagement statistics for marketers.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is geared towards large marketing teams with multi-touch campaigns, enterprise data stacks, and the patience to define and implement deeply customizable journeys.
It’s less “schedule posts” and more “orchestrate micro-moments across channels”. Think generative AI writing your emails, SMS journeys that trigger based on Data Cloud signals, and dashboards that map sentiment to ROI.
It’s got:
Salesforce Marketing Cloud starts at $1,500/month (Growth Edition), with the Advanced Edition at $3,250/month, both billed annually. No free plan, and onboarding help is basically non-negotiable.
Its steep price tag and complexity mean this tool isn’t built for agile content teams. You’ll need ops support, time, and strategy to get real value.
Sendible’s all-in-one platform for scheduling, approval, and managing social media campaigns.
Sendible knows its audience: content-forward teams who want to stay close to their following. It’s a solid all-in-one for scheduling, engaging, and reporting, with a handy CRM-style contact manager that makes tracking conversations feel like a relationship. It won’t replace a full-on CRM, but for social-first teams juggling multiple brands, it’s surprisingly effective.
Sendible has these standout features:
Sendible starts at $29/month for solo creators (6 profiles), with team plans from $89/month and up. All plans come with a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.
While it handles content operations well, Sendible lacks deeper CRM features like lead scoring, advanced automation, or pipeline views.
Agorapulse’s CRM interface showing detailed social performance insights and audience growth metrics.
Agorapulse is built for teams managing high volumes of social interactions and needing audit-ready performance data. Its unified inbox consolidates organic and paid post comments, DMs, mentions, and reviews across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google Business.
You can assign messages, filter by content type or campaign, and even bulk-hide or label ad comments. The Inbox Assistant lets you automate moderation based on rules — great for managing scale without chaos.
CRM-like contact profiles store engagement history and sentiment, while native Salesforce and HubSpot integrations make it easy to sync contacts and track attribution. Publishing is equally developed.
These are its key features:
Plans start at $79/user/month, billed annually. A free plan is available for solo users (3 profiles, 10 scheduled posts), and all paid plans come with a 30-day free trial.
While powerful for social-focused teams, Agorapulse doesn’t support email, SMS, or blog publishing, so it’s not a good fit if you’re looking for a unified content ops platform beyond social.
Social CRM promises a lot: better engagement, streamlined workflows, and improved visibility into your audience. But between what’s sold and what’s shipped lies a more complex reality — one that experienced marketing, social, and operations teams are reckoning with in 2025.
With increasing scrutiny from regulators and platforms, social data collection is under the microscope. The recent Apollo.io and Seamless.ai bans from LinkedIn are a wake-up call. Even well-funded platforms can lose access overnight if they overstep platform rules or extract data without consent.
If your CRM depends on scraping, workarounds, or ambiguous integrations, you’re risking platform access and your brand’s compliance posture. Modern social CRM tools must strike a balance between capturing meaningful interactions while respecting API limitations, user privacy, and data residency laws. Tools like Planable take a safer route by relying on platform-native permissions and clear scopes, not scraping or backchannel API calls.
It’s easy to underestimate how much friction emerges when a social CRM has to work alongside existing tools, like email, project management, legacy CRMs, and shared drives. Even when technical integrations exist, they often fail due to workflow mismatches.
For example, if client approvals still live in email or Slack, but post-scheduling is done in a CRM, bottlenecks form. What teams really need is a shared context layer. Think of a space where collaboration, feedback, and publishing are visible and time-stamped. Planable’s collaborative calendar isn’t a CRM replacement, but it can help fill this specific operational gap.
The average social CRM user juggles comments, DMs, tags, brand mentions, and ad responses, often across 6–8 platforms. Without an intelligent triage system, teams drop the ball on high-intent interactions. And when a customer complaint or partnership opportunity goes unanswered for 48 hours, it doesn’t matter how good your sentiment dashboard looks.
Unified inboxes help, but only if paired with assignment rules, SLA expectations, and team accountability. Agorapulse, for instance, stands out in this space, but only if your team is trained to use it.
No matter how user-friendly a tool claims to be, adoption stalls when teams don’t understand why they’re using it. Reps revert to spreadsheets. Content teams default to Google Docs. Social listening gets ignored. Sound familiar?
Successful teams budget for onboarding, not just licenses. They run live sessions. They define what success looks like per role.
One common pitfall: using social CRM as a blunt outbound tool. When every comment becomes a lead, and every mention triggers a sales sequence, you erode trust. Customers know when they’re being treated as data points.
The smarter approach is to use CRM insights to inform how you listen, not just how you sell. Surface past interactions, content preferences, or campaign responses. But keep the human touch. Relationships, not rows in a database, drive loyalty.
Social CRM only works when you can answer questions like: Which content types drive conversions? What’s our average response time? Which channels lead to meaningful feedback?
Yet many teams skip this step either because reports are too clunky or insights are siloed. That’s where reporting modules matter. Good analytics show you what to repeat and what to ditch.
One of the biggest missteps in social CRM is hiding or downplaying criticism. Negative reviews, comment threads, or escalations compound. Without a framework for social media risk management, escalations can slip through and damage brand trust. Teams need structured ways to tag, escalate, and resolve issues, especially across multiple brands or locations.
And while sentiment scoring is useful, it often misses sarcasm, cultural nuance, or subtle frustration. Human moderation still matters. Your social CRM should allow for fast human judgment, instead of trying to replace it with AI labels.
Adding more dashboards won’t fix operational fatigue. The real issue is clarity. Teams need to be able to filter by status, campaign, urgency, platform, etc.
Planable, for example, intentionally limits scope: it doesn’t try to be a CRM, an inbox, or a BI tool. But as a shared calendar for social teams, it reduces mental load without sacrificing transparency. For many B2B content teams, that tradeoff is welcome.
Automated sentiment tools can tell you if a post has lots of emojis or certain keywords. But can they tell you if a sarcastic tweet is praise or shade? Or if a user is venting or joking?
Probably not, and that’s OK. The goal of social CRM isn’t perfect emotion detection. It’s giving your team enough context to make informed, empathetic decisions. While social media sentiment analysis can surface trends at scale, it still needs to be paired with human context and judgment.Tools should help you tag patterns, flag risks, and act fast. That’s why we need humans to deploy, review, and work alongside these tools. Human touch is irreplaceable.
In the end, the best social CRM isn’t the one with the longest feature list, but the one that fits your team’s workflow. So, think about it. Are you chasing:
Then, choose a tool that supports collaboration, scales with your business growth, and helps you act on real customer feedback.
PS: Planable ticks all those boxes, with an intuitive calendar, streamlined approvals, and a social inbox built for speed. 👉 Try Planable for free and start building brand awareness, the organized way.
Maria is a content marketer, SEO copywriter, and social media specialist with experience working for a wide range of B2B businesses. She loves to keep up with the evolution of digital marketing, particularly in areas such as social media management, content, SEO, and PR. She is passionate about her work and loves to add a unique spin to any topic.
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