We are all familiar with the benefits of CRM software, but what is really drawing a line in the sand these days is its social element. CRM programs no longer deal only with information but put the accent on conversations being the core of quality business relationships. At their base, social CRM tools integrate data from conversational platforms and social media, and analyze social ROI in order to adopt marketing trends and strategies. Conversations are being monitored and engaged in, in order to enhance existing communications and to use the positive influence online channel activity. Social CRM tools can either be independent programs or supplements to a traditional CRM – as long as they convert conversational content into relevant information, they are a bonus for your management. But how to choose the best social CRM software for enterprises and SMBs? Let this guide help you!

The best way to go is to sign up for at least a few free trials or demo and basic unpaid plans from leading social media CRM providers. With that method, you will have the opportunity to test the important elements and you will get a good comparison of the capabilities of each app. The best thing to do is to try the list of services that currently have the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our social meida CRM reviews, and choose the best social media CRM for your company: Insightly reviews, InStream, Zurmo CRM, Really Simple Systems CRM, Salesboom CRM, Converge Hub, Highrise, HubSpot CRM, FreshSales, and PipeDrive.

The need to use a social CRM system is somehow default to every business, because despite the fact that many businesses don’t have a face-to-face interaction with their customers, they still need to introduce a system that provides such on customer-to-customer level. Relationships can tell the story of a business even when the business is not involved, which is exactly why social CRM evolved to be the responsibility of entire teams and corporations.

• Small Businesses. Starters and small businesses don’t exactly have the time to enhance customer relationship with social media, due the fact that they work in small teams. Social CRMs can be one of the backbones of their success because it doesn’t let a drop of information slip away, being at the same time an affordable cloud based solution that doesn’t require investments small companies can’t afford.
• Medium Businesses. Medium business are the category where business is growing the fastest, and more and more customers need to be served every day. These companies purchase social CRMs in order to manage their increasing number of customer relationships, and to redirect costs from social marketing to more important aspects of their business.
• Large Businesses. It’s no big secret that the success of large enterprises goes hand by hand with advanced CRMs, in particular such that summarize all of their resources and possibilities to push business in the right direction. Thanks to their CRM systems, large companies manage to engage thousands of customers at the same time, and to use the fusion of social and business processes to their advantage.
• Sales Teams. A CRM for social media is a beneficial tool for sales teams. It maximizes the potential of various social media channels to improve the company’s customer relationship, which then results in better brand exposure and successful conversions. With the help of a social CRM tool, sales teams can easily create data-driven strategies to deliver better customer service.

• Insightly: A popular CRM for small business with a robust feature suite including pipeline management, contact and task management to make your business more efficient.
• Commence CRM: A comprehensive applications set including the traditional contact management, but also lead ranking, project management, and analytics. It is at the same time highly customizable and mobile friendly.
• Zurmo CRM: A gamified CRM solution that combines project management with marketing automation, and is hosted in cloud to facilitate association with other CRMs and productivity tools.
• InStream: A unique goal-centred CRM platform that combines email and data management, and offers many productivity tools for companies to create and maintain customer relationships.
• SalezShark: An innovative platform that preserves valuable customer relationships, and has a variety of smart features to nurture conversions and to increase profit.
• HubSpot CRM: An easy-to-use CRM solution that helps you manage your contacts and sales pipeline in one location.
• Freshsales: A sales CRM by Freshworks that offers AI-based lead scoring, sales management, email sync, and SMS integration to empower your sales team.
• Pipedrive: A cloud-based sales software with lead management, communication, workflow automation, and business reporting features, allowing you to follow up on every opportunity and close deals faster.

Social CRM applications can be divided in few categories, depending on their features, advocacy, and the customer experience they provide:

• Social Publishing Apps. Organizations and companies use these apps to develop social media marketing strategies, coordinate messages, and discover trends.
• Social Media Engagement Apps. These apps ensure a continuous dialogue between the company and its customers, and monitor social media to determine where their brand has been mentioned.
• Social Analytics Apps. The apps are an invaluable asset for comparative insight, meaning that they can identify success factors and provide feedback on the efficiency of customer service.
• Internal Community Apps. They serve to enhance employee collaboration when contributing to a marketing project, or when attending a specific client. Some of them have external communication modules, used to serve customers and gather per-to-peer market research functions.
• Product Advocacy Apps. These are the apps whose presence enables customers to contact directly their brand representatives and to chat with them on social networks. They can be really helpful when it comes to customers’ product purchase decisions or exposing content to the attention of search engines.
• Social Listening Apps. These tools help you to monitor feedback for your brand via social media platforms. They keep track of customer feedback, discussions about your brand and products, direct mentions, and keywords and topics related to your business. Finally, they let you look at your competitor’s performance and strategies. This way, you can incorporate successful marketing ideas into your own campaigns.

Our detailed comparisons indicate that these are the basic features to expect from your next social CRM system:

• Support for various social platforms. Social media networks emerge every day, followed up by a serious increase of CRM performance expectations. Responding to all of them is what makes CRM social: it must respond to your need to manage multiple accounts, and to develop social media platforms. Observed from the technical side, integrating a CRM with a social media platform is not difficult, which is why you’re entitled to request an array of integrations.
• Analytics. How would the CRM be useful to you if you export data from social platforms, and turn to another program to analyze it? A great CRM has to be empowered to do its own analytics, either using its own tools or third-party plug-ins. In addition, social CRM analytics are advanced ones, meaning that the program is SEO empowered, performs behavioral and sentiment analysis, or compares prices to the benefit of busy marketers.
• Brand monitoring. Excellent CRMs perform the exiting task of ‘following’ your brand around: whenever and wherever it has been mentioned or discussed, you will know that!
• Super-powerful Lead Management features. The platform should include nothing less than Lead Management, Contact Management, Automated Address Books, Web to Load & Web to Contact, and Email Integrations.
• Super-powerful Opportunity Management features. There should as well be a robust opportunity tracking suite, including Notes, Comments, Events, Filters, Custom Fields, Tags, Notifications, Followers, Sharing, and Linking contacts to opportunities.
• Social Media Management. Some social CRM solutions are equipped with social media management tools, allowing you to monitor all your social media accounts in one place and keep track of direct brand mentions from various platforms.

These are the benefits companies experience when using a solid social CRM platform:

• Enhanced customer relationships. It is all about it! When a company doesn’t have a full picture on its data, its organizational capacity is hindered by the fact that it can’t serve customers properly. With a social CRM, the company gets to audit and track information to identify customers’ needs, and to keep an eye on pricing, contracts, or even personal information which helps it take communication on a whole new friendly level.
• Integration of departments. We’re not sure whether there is such thing as a company where everybody knows what to do, but a good social CRM definitely gets close. Departments need to integrate seamlessly, so that a customer won’t even notice his request being transferred from one to another. It is just priceless to be able to skip the ‘We can’t handle your issue, sir, you’ll have to talk to my colleague’ part!
• Improved marketing strategies. A clear insight on every part of the pipeline means at the same time monitoring the lead-to-sale process front to end.  This way, managers get to evaluate productivity by measuring time/resources spent by the company on every particular activity. So far, it proved to be the best way to monitor employee performance on individual basis.
• Unified social notifications. Missing messages and requests on social networks is easy, even for an individual running a private profile. Social CRMs do the magic of highlighting incoming communications, and even better: they unite all of them in a single program. A great CRM is supposed to monitor all channels that are relevant to your business and stream notifications all together for you to respond both to requests and opportunities. An additional benefit is that you get to follow real-time profile updates.
• Integration with existing contact records. Putting your social CRM in the center of customer relationship maintenance means to sync it with your existing contact records. As a result, even the sales and marketing team will be involved in your customer relationships, and will engage into exiting opportunities and productive strategies.

We’re well way past emails and phone calls as the only means to deliver customer support or gain feedback from consumers. Social media platforms are now playing an indispensable role in the CRM processes of many businesses. And to help you maximize your customer relationship strategies via social media platforms, below are some of the latest trends that you can use to your advantage.

1. CRM continues to go social. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn go a long way in improving customer relationships, as proven by successful ecommerce businesses whose CRM processes are tied to such platforms. In the coming years, experts see a continued rise of social CRM to help businesses incorporate more consumer feedback into their business strategies.
2. The role of AI. For many years now, AI has affected various industries and the CRM landscape is no exception. Businesses from different parts of the world have adopted AI to facilitate data capture, automate workflows, deliver immediate responses, and gain accurate business insights. AI integrations with CRM processes will help boost global business revenue in the years to come.
3. Younger generations leading CRM use. As Millenials and Generation Z consumers gain more buying power, CRM applications are considered as “extremely critical” in the success of any brand. This is because a CRM application helps maximize business performance, and the tech-savvy generation of today relies on CRM technology for more engaging customer experience.

With the right customer data at hand, you can identify key market trends, reach a wider customer base, follow up on prospects and leads, and address customer issues and concerns immediately. These are all better realized with a proper social CRM system in place. Below, we compiled some useful CRM statistics to help you gain the benefits of a social CRM platform.

1. Businesses using social CRM tools experience an 8% increase in productivity. (Nucleus Research)
2. 47% of businesses with CRM systems believe that CRM makes a great impact on customer satisfaction. (Nutshell)
3. Sales teams expect that CRM systems could improve customer satisfaction (66%), customer service (74%), and customer retention (56%). (Tech News World)
4. On Twitter, customer interactions have increased by 250%. (Twitter)
5. About 25% of social media users who send concerns and inquiries vial social media expect an immediate response from businesses. (Adweek)