Five Tips on Integrating Social Media with Salesforce®

Tip # 1- Align Social Strategy with Business Process

Strategies Must Involve Other Internal Teams

• Social media marketing cannot be an independent silo of activity; strategies for generating interest (leads) should always involve the sales and marketing department to ensure leads are of high quality.

• A process for handling customer complaints originating from social media must involve the support organization, and interaction should be documented as a case record.

If You Post Social Icons-Monitor Them!

• If your company encourages customers to ‘connect with us’ via social media, ensure the resources are in place to actually communicate via these methods.

• In the early days of email, many sales and service organizations posted ‘contact us’ email addresses which were unmonitored, frustrating many customers.

• Social media operates 24/7/365. This reality needs to be considered by support teams tasked with social media inquiries.

Tip # 2- Define the Social Customer Support Strategy

Synchronize Social Complaints and Customer Support Processes

• Handling customer complaints via social media must involve the support organization who should be equipped with the tools to manage communications within this channel.

• Proper training is critical; you don’t want a support CSR to engage in argumentative or negative social interaction that is visible to the public.

• Larger organizations should consider setting up a dedicated Twitter® handle such as @AcmeCoSupport to funnel Twitter originated inquiries directly to the service team quickly.

Classify if Social Media is the Source of the Support Request

• Support organizations have multiple classifications for tracking incoming requests from the usual channels such as phoned-in, web received, emailed, etc.

• For requests that originate from social media, the case record should allow for a precise source classification

• A Twitter® complaint should be classified specifically, not simply categorized as a ‘web’ complaint.

Add Social Media Message Classifications to Task and Activity Value Lists

• Task and activity picklists (which note completed actions or to-do’s) are commonly structured around values such as ‘email/emailed’, ‘call/called’, or ‘meeting’.

• If an inquiry was responded to via Twitter, adding ‘tweet’ or ‘tweeted’ to the task and activity picklists can be valuable.

Tip # 3- Define the Social Lead Generation Strategy

Record and Classify Social Interaction

• There are dozens of industry and interest specific social networks.If you are posting articles to social sites, track the responses and comments, and create a new lead (or support case if a complaint) for these interactions.

Add Fields to Classify Lead Generation Activity Status

• If your sales team cultivates prospects from their Linked-In® connections, create a field on the Lead Object called ‘Linked-In Lead Activity’ to document this as a specific lead generation process. Use values such as (‘Connection Request Sent’, ‘Connection Request Confirmed’, ‘Message Sent’, etc.) to encourage activity and document the precise status of the connection.

Tip # 4- Index all Social Interactions

Determine the Record Type to Contain the Information

• Social activity or interaction can be at the lead, contact, account or support level.

• Social media-obtained leads should meet same criteria required before they are moved to the qualified stage and escalated to an account or new opportunity record.

Use Value Lists or Check Boxes Wherever Possible

• Users accessing Salesforce via the cannot type on a keyboard in the same way as desktop users can, therefore, prepared value lists help with indexing and data consistency.

• Because most Social Media activity occurs on mobile devices, ease of use and data entry is critical.

Classify Social Media Users

• Indexing a Twitter user by their activity type can be valuable for marketers.

• “Active Tweeter” or “Large Twitter Following Base” tell you more about the contact than just storing a Twitter handle. Consider creating a classification metric based on how many followers a Twitter (or Linked-In) user has.

• Going over and above to resolve an issue for a customer with ‘1,000+ Twitter Followers’ can result in positive social media publicity.Conversely, dismissing or failing to resolve their complaint can have a huge negative impact publicly.

Tip # 5- More Technology is not Always the Solution

Social Media Listening Tools

• Listening Tools are used to monitor and listen for postings about your brand or industry.If you do use these systems, ensure there is a process in place for dealing with complaints, inquiries and opportunities.

• Ensure the person or group monitoring the system knows how to process or escalate the varying type of comments that may emerge.

• Ensure that any public complaint discussions are quickly migrated to a private session.

Social Media ‘Front Ends’

• New technologies and various connectors available on the can automate high volume lead creation by creating a Salesforce record from your team’s Linked-In and other Social Media connections.

• Use caution with these tools as automating the mass creation of unqualified leads can be an unproductive exercise and lead to a cluttered database.

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors. Examples cited in this article are only examples. Salesforce®, Salesforce1 Mobile App™, AppExchange® are trademarks of Salesforce.com, inc. Linked-In® is a trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Twitter® is a trademark of Twitter International Company.

© 2017 Edgemont CRM, LLC. All Rights Reserved - August 2017

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