Best Social CRM

After two weeks of testing and researching the 10 of the best social CRMs and comparing them in terms of customer insights, overall functionality, and sentiment analysis capabilities, we identified Sprout Social as our top pick. It features an unbreakable combo of essential social media tools and a rock-solid content management system to equip you and your team with everything you need for social domination in one place.

The Best Social CRM for Most

Choosing the top features & capabilities of Sprout Social is tough because of its feature-rich nature, with dozens of tools designed to captivate and grow your audience. From performance measurement, listening and reporting solutions, publishing, social engagement, and analytics tools, there’s no shortage of opportunities to expand your reach and get in front of the right audiences… more often.

Besides integrating with the top social platforms, you can create business reports to enhance your social strategy, navigate campaign sentiment on autopilot, dig deep into the numbers, and more.

The Best Social CRM Options to Consider

1. Sprout Social — Best for most users
2. Zoho Social — Best for social media agencies
3. Salesforce Social Studio — Best for social management at scale
4. Falcon.io — Best for single users
5. Bitrix24 — Best free social CRM

When it Makes Sense to Invest Into A Social CRM

Without a doubt, social media plays an increasingly important role in virtually every business’ marketing strategy. And a social CRM solution is one of those tools it’s safe to say your team will end up using at some point— especially as you start seeing growth. 

One way to decide if it makes sense to invest in a social CRM solution is thinking critically about where your traffic and sales are coming from. In truth, this is probably one of the biggest indicators of whether it’s time to invest in a social CRM.

If your sales are mostly tied to your social presence, as opposed to bringing in sales primarily from paid traffic or SEO, you’re better off integrating a social CRM into your workflow early instead of needing it and not having it.

In short, if social presence equals sales, investing in a social CRM is a no-brainer to help you maintain and increase your sales each quarter. As they say, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. 

Now, here’s a look at all the top social CRM options out there, so you can choose which one fits best with your business goals. 

#1 – Sprout Social — The Best for Most

When you cross a social media CRM and a content management system you get Sprout Social. It’s a social CRM designed to equip your marketing team with the ability to manage and maintain lasting customer relationships.

It does this by allowing you to gather, monitor, and measure analytics from key social channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and Twitter. With its centralized social messaging inbox, your marketing team can organize and stay on top of incoming customer interactions without missing a beat.

Additionally, you can assign team tasks, approve and plan social content, and prioritize tasks all in one place. With Sprout Social, you not only monitor analytics and overall customer engagement, but you can also use it as a content management tool, as you plan social content ahead of time year-round and analyze ROI.

Teams, managers, and marketing agencies can streamline their marketing efforts because of how easy Sprout Social is to use and how much they facilitate the onboarding process with plenty of customer support. 

Overall Sprout Social is specifically designed to cut out busy work and to equip you to get the most out of your social media campaigns. Though it doesn’t fall under the full-featured CRM category, it’s a valuable tool worth investing in for most people who want to up their social media game. 

• Standard – $249 per user per month
• Professional – $399 per user per month
• Advanced – $499 per user per month

Sprout social has price points geared towards larger businesses that want to streamline their social media strategy. This is why their Standard tier starts at $249 per user per month—with access to tools like social profiles, all-in-one social inbox, publishing and posts queueing, social content calendar, and access to its mobile app for on-the-go management. 

For a full list of features, you can always check out its pricing page. Luckily, it also offers a free 30-day trial with no strings attached. 

Try Sprout Social here and get started streamlining your social media efforts today. 

#2 – Zoho Social — The Best for Agencies

Zoho Social puts the social wheel in your hands with its robust social media tools fit for agencies looking to refine their social media strategies. 

The all-in-one agency platform offers a slew of management tools that enable your agency to schedule, monitor, and gather reports on all its social media efforts. You can create custom roles with custom permissions and create unique dashboards for different clients. 

However, Zoho Social doesn’t only equip you with the tools to professionally manage social media accounts, it also hands you the tools you need to capture and interact with clients, send invoices, and messaging with your agency domain and logo. 

Missing deadlines are a thing of the past with Zoho Social’s content calendar. It gives you a bird’s eye view of your publishing queues and timelines for a more efficient social publishing schedule. 

Not only that, but you can also schedule your social posts at peak times when your audience is most likely to engage with the help of Zoho Social’s reporting and analytics features. 

• Standard – $10 a month billed annually
• Professional – $25 a month billed annually
• Premium – $37.50 a month billed annually

Zoho Social isn’t only effective as a social CRM, it’s affordable too. With prices starting at only $10 a month for one team member, it can be ideal for a startup social media agency to grow and scale quickly. 

However, even its Premium tier only allows for up to three team members to manage one brand. This might seem limiting for bigger marketing agencies. 

But if you’re managing more than 50 brands you can get in touch with them individually for a personalized plan.

Get started with Zoho Social here. 

#3 – Salesforce Social Studio — The Best for Social Management at Scale

Salesforce is a giant in the marketing industry. So it isn’t surprising to see they offer a powerful social media CRM solution—Salesforce Social Studio. 

The tool enables you to connect both your management and sales teams in one centralized dashboard so they’re able to meet minds and build lasting customer relationships through just about any social channel. 

Social Studio helps with measuring community engagement, social listening, and publishing across networks as you measure your performance. You can manage approvals across internal teams, work from a desktop or mobile device, and draft, share, and review content as you collaborate on campaigns. 

The Salesforce Social Studio is part of a larger marketing cloud and suite of software products offered by Salesforce. This makes it a great social CRM solution to integrate if you’re already using other Salesforce products or plan to in the future. Not to mention its all-in-one approach to its products constantly lands it on the top of our best list. 

Salesforce’s Social Studio prices aren’t for the faint of heart. It’s clearly a social CRM tool that’s meant for social management at scale. In other words—perfect for enterprise-level management. 

You’re looking at $1,000 monthly for its Basic tier, which includes access to tools like brand listening and engagement, monthly mentions, publishing across two social channels, sentiment insights, and influencer scores as well as automated posts and messages. 

• Basic – $1,000/month billed annually
• Pro – $4,000/month billed annually
• Corporate – $12,000/month billed annually
• Enterprise – $40,000/month billed annually  

Salesforce lets you try Social Studio for free with guided content and live onboarding webinars. This is a great option if you’re on the fence about integrating it into your social media strategy. 

Get started with Salesforce Social Studio here. 

#4 – Falcon.io — The Best for single users

Falcon.io might be the best tool for single users, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t used by brand giants like Coca Cola, Toyota, Momondo, and McDonalds. That’s some pretty remarkable flexibility, which means as a single user you’ll have a lot of social power behind you. 

With Falcon.io, you can manage all your major social media channels by publishing with a predetermined content calendar, driving engagement, and measuring the resulting analytics. 

The CRM system makes it easy to plan campaigns from beginning to end. With its easy to use dashboard, you can draft social campaigns, cross-post across channels, and save time, all while keeping brand consistency.

To tie it all together, Falcon.io lets you manage all your social media messages through a customizable inbox and automated notifications. It makes it easy to keep track of new followers, lost followers, and organic impressions so you always know how fast you’re growing. 

As a standalone social CRM tool, Falcon.io is completely thorough in the tools it offers to make your social media campaigns a success.  

• Full Suite – Request Demo
• Essentials – Starting at $129 a month

If you’re interested in Falcon.io’s Full Suite plan, you’ll have to request a demo. For its single user plan, it starts at $129 a month for one user and five social channels. 

To start with Falcon.io, you can sign up here. 

#5 – Bitrix24 — The Best Free Social CRM

Bootstrapped businesses on a budget in need of a powerful social CRM can look no further than Bitrix24. Besides the fact that it’s really free to use, it integrates with a long list of social channels that include Slack, Skype, Telegram, VK, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and more.

You can automate and efficiently streamline your social media advertising campaigns and get 5GB of storage for all your social media files. 

The beauty of Bitrix24 as a free social media CRM is that it doesn’t only come with the basic social media management tools, you get access to additional tools to manage your email marketing campaigns, the ability to store unlimited contacts, create custom statuses, create a sales workflow, and a slew of other tools native to a full-featured CRM tool with plenty of integrations to boot.

To get started managing your social media channels for free, sign up with Bitrix24 here. 

Methodology for Choosing the Best Social CRM

How do you choose a social CRM tool that aligns with your business and helps you reach real results? 

For starters, a reliable social CRM will help you do one thing well: track your social media metrics and customer engagement. This can mean tracking social traffic to your site, engagement ratios, brand mentions, follower growth, marketing campaign reach, and more. This way you’re able to successfully manage your social presence, respond to customer issues quicker, build brand awareness, and ultimately increase sales. 

Besides that, it’s important to consider the size of your team, the industry you operate in, and the specific non-negotiable features your business needs to function beyond the basics. Going forward, here are a few key criteria to think about.

Full-featured CRM vs. standalone tools

To add, you’ll need to decide whether you need a standalone social media tool to integrate into your existing CRM or if you’re interested in a full-featured CRM platform with built-in social media tools instead. 

Both have their pros and cons, and your choice between them largely depends on if you or your team have already integrated a CRM into your daily workflow. If so, then you can easily integrate a standalone social CRM tool with your existing software. 

Customer demographics

A great social CRM will gather and present insight to you about the who, what, when, where, and how of your social media customer profile. This includes automatically updating your database as your audience grows and evolves.

Customer demographics are an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to selling and growing your brand through social media engagement. The more your social CRM can fill you in on these key data points, the better decisions you can make. 

Otherwise, having a blind spot when it comes to who exactly your social customers are can hurt you in the long run. Strong customer demographics tools that help you gather the right information makes for a key feature to look for in any social CRM tool you might be looking at. 

Sentiment analysis

Whether you’re a small business or an enterprise, it’s possible to keep a pulse on what your customers and prospects are saying about you. A solid CRM tool can help you track brand mentions across social media channels.

This way you’re never left in the dark as you gauge what goodwill your brand is generating, if there are issues to be addressed quickly, or if your customers are all mentioning the same pain points. 

Summary

There’s no doubt the right social CRM can supercharge your social media marketing efforts. The only thing standing between you and a befitting tool is making a choice from so many options. 

But that ends with this guide. Here’s a quick overview of every tool I reviewed here:

1. Sprout Social — Best for most users
2. Zoho Social — Best for social media agencies
3. Salesforce Social Studio — Best for social management at scale
4. Falcon.io — Best for single users
5. Bitrix24 — Best free social CRM

Once you’re ready to make your final choice, dive in and start implementing a more informed and streamlined social strategy.