26 Sep Social CRM: Tools That Can Help You Know Your Audience Better
What are our customers spending their time doing? What are they saying about us on their channels when we aren’t being tagged? Is there a need they have that we could be fulfilling? How can we interact with them to show them that we get them and care? Those are just a few questions that brands might have when discussing their customer database, which typically is a list of names along with mailing and email addresses. That’s great to have, but when a brand is looking to connect with their customers on a social level, those things aren’t always helpful.
In order to connect with customers further, organizations look to Social CRM. Simply put Social CRM is using social media services, techniques and technology to engage with their customers on a more personal level. To locate those customers on their social channels it requires a bit of social stalking, although it sounds nicer to phrase it as ‘intense research of an individual’. To go about our social stalking there are two ways that we’ll look into, one puts all the work in your hands while the other enlists vendors that have already got it down to a science.
Going about it the manual way can be fun and rewarding as you channel your inner Nev Schulman and possibly enlist your very own Max to help along the way. If you have a customer’s email address, entering it into Google’s search engine may provide you with some of the information that you need (while saving money) but the process can be long and painful depending on how illusive your customers want to be and how long your email list is.
To make the process quicker and more turnkey, there are vendors out there that offer their social stalking services and after speaking with a handful of them two stood out as rock stars amongst them all.
RocketBolt is a company that provides real-time feeds to easily visualize lead activity, giving others the advantage they need to identify valuable assets. Their platform can be integrated with a business website or they can provide standalone offerings such as social media listening utilizing an email address list. When an email list is provided over, they run it through their system to provide back the available information on a user. Currently they can tap into Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ and provide back the handles to your customers so you can interact with them on multiple levels.
With their integrated platform, when set up with your company’s website, it provides real time notifications on the leads that you’re monitoring. If a customer tweets or retweets something that’s relevant to your interests, instantly you can interact with them connecting with them on another level, aside from an email blast that might get lost in the fray. Their platform can also inform you if a lead is mentioned in a news article allowing for you to interact and congratulate them and will even pull in information on their company depending on how you want it set up.
Pipl, whose name is just super fun to say, is another vendor that is well versed in the social stalking arena. With over 10 billion records from millions of online and offline sources, they match people with their social media profiles, as well as provide demographic, professional and additional information on a user. Like RocketBolt they have different ways to provide the information requested, an email list can be provided and ran through their system or they can provide an API integration that can be programmed into your website or used as a macro in Excel. Through their platform they can provide back social information from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram.
They also have a people search engine that can be utilized similar to the manual Google search, which, let’s be honest, you are going to go type your name in after reading this post. I may have gotten overly geeked trying to compare their search versus Google when typing in my name.
Now that we’ve armed you with a little information on social stalking and previously armed you with how to locate your customers off channel, you should be well equipped to make those connections to keep your customers as your advocates and spread the word about how great of a brand you are. However, if you are still scratching your head not quite sure on how to tackle this beast that is social stalking, reach out to us and we’d be more than happy to help!
