Salesforce Bolsters Social Studio for Integration Across Departments
Sales, marketing, and customer service teams will be able to make use of social data from more than 1 billion sources.
Sales, marketing, and customer service teams will be able to make use of social data from more than 1 billion sources.
Salesforce has unveiled its next generation of Social Studio, adding features that enable businesses to make use of social media across multiple departments.
The company says the updated Social Studio has new features designed to take social media use beyond marketing and social media teams to other business areas including sales and customer service.
These include Social Listening, which Salesforce says monitors more than 1 billion social data sources across networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, along with blogs and news websites. The company says the feature will allow marketing and social teams to get rid of multiple spreadsheets and carry out social content activity from the Social Studio.
Social Customer Service enables customer service teams to monitor social networks for support issues and then route tasks to the most appropriate person or team.
A third new feature is called Social Lead Engagement, which is designed to help sales representatives find new leads by listening into conversations happening across multiple social networks.
The social data from Social Studio can then be used in tandem with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud to enable sales people to engage with potential customers via the cloud-based service.
Helena Schwenk, principal analyst at MWD Advisors, told ClickZ’s sister publication V3 that the updated Social Studio will help Salesforce to expand its service offerings and keep pace with rivals.
“For Salesforce, Social Studio offers an opportunity to extend the capabilities of both its Sales and Service cloud as well as increase cross-selling among its different cloud platforms,” she said.
“At the same time, this release keeps Salesforce competitive as both Adobe and Oracle in particular continue to extend their cloud-based social offerings.”
However, Schwenk argued that social media is still a rather niche tool within sales departments.
“Although the notion of embedding capabilities into sales processes isn’t without merit, I just don’t think it’s a mainstream consideration for organizations today, especially in terms of finding sales leads, for example. That said, I have seen a couple of examples of social analytics being used to identify intent-to-buy signals in social media conversations,” she explained.
This article was originally published on V3.