Tracking Social Media with CRM

Social media and CRM go together perfectly. Social media is a powerful platform for communicating with a large number of people and expanding your reach. One significant challenge for marketers is that the bulk of the data collected about the use of social media is kept in the hands of the social media companies. Good social media measuring tools help extract that data.

To make the most of your social media marketing, your primary objective should be to drive people from the social media websites and applications to your website and applications. Social media is a means to start people on your buyer journeys. This connection between social media and your CRM is sometimes called social CRM.

Measuring impressions and actions with CRM

All social media channels provide some level of analytics. Some social media networks give you more insight into these analytics, allowing you to connect activity on those social networks with your CRM.

Whenever you post anything in social media, tag inbound links to your website with campaign IDs. You can then track attribution, a connection between a source campaign and a contact in your CRM. You can see which social media channels contribute to new leads and conversions.

When your social data is integrated with your CRM, you can automate actions that your contacts take in social media. After you make a social media connection, a like, share, retweet, or other action can trigger a workflow within your CRM. Scheduling CRM activities from social engagement is particularly useful when your salespeople have a limited number of leads. Rather than relying on your marketing team to call up your salesperson and tell her a lead liked a post, she can be alerted to it automatically and take action.

Social media tracking should give you some insight into how well you’re doing overall. Some basic measurements illuminate the strength of your brand on social media. The number of impressions (the number of times someone sees something you post) is a start, but you can learn more with deeper analysis. A few key metrics tell you what you need to know:

• Conversation is a measurement of interaction between you and your contacts. If people reply to your posts, they’re contributing content to your brand and your messaging.
• Amplification tracks when people share your content. The more sharing, the greater your reach and the more brand credibility you’re establishing.
• Applause measures when someone likes or favorites one of your posts. This statistic tells you the level of empathy and agreement you have within your audience.
• Impact is an overall measurement of engagement with your audience.
• Interest is a summary of clicks that your audience has done with your content. More interest means more clicks, which often can be traced to an ROI.

The image below displays all these metrics together on the same chart. Spend the time to see how your social media posts impact your business.

Calculating influence and lead qualification in your CRM

Third-party data sources can connect social media data to your CRM. FullContact is one such provider, allowing you to learn more about the contact and his sphere of influence through data appending. Based on a contact’s email address, you can learn a lot of additional information that is useful to people in sales and marketing, such as number of followers on Twitter, topics blogged about, or the contact’s LinkedIn page address.

With FullContact (or a similar vendor) data available in your CRM, you have the power of information at your fingertips. The easier it is to discover important information about leads, the more successful your sales team can close them.