One of the trickiest things about social media is that there are multiple platforms you need to keep up with. Just about every business should have a presence on “the big four” (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn). And for certain businesses, additional platforms like SnapChat or Pinterest might make sense.

When you’re juggling customer information that’s coming in through your website, your email, your customer service numbers, and all of your social channels, if you don’t have a system to keep it all straight, you’ll want to pull your hair out!

That’s where a customer relationship management tool (AKA, CRM) with a social component comes in. A social-friendly CRM allows you to track all brand interactions in one place. This provides tremendous value to your business.

Let me walk you through the five biggest, but least talked-about, benefits to using a CRM system with a social component.

1. Coordinate Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service

Social media ownership usually falls to your marketing team. They create your content calendar, write posts, and manage engagement. But a lot of what happens on social media is relevant to other teams within your organization, too.

When a prospect responds to an ad with a couple of detailed questions about your offer, your sales team should be looped in, because this is likely a hot lead. When a customer posts a nasty review about a bad experience, it’s your customer service team that needs to be on top of responding and de-escalating the situation.

CRMs allow you to keep all of your teams on the same page. When everyone has access to the information coming in through social media, it eliminates silos and allows your entire business to respond more effectively to the good (interested prospects!), the bad (angry customers!), and everything in between.

2. Segment Your Audiences More Effectively

Audience segmentation is the key to effective marketing. Every marketing move you make should be driven by the picture of your ideal customer, but sometimes there are important distinctions to be made within the group. When you recognize that different segments of your audience need to be approached with different marketing tactics, it allows you to increase the level of personalization they each receive, which in turn piques their interest and boosts sales.

Say, for example, you run a housewares company. While your clients obviously share a need for home goods in common, perhaps there are some specific categories of ideal customers. Maybe one group is engaged couples, who register with your business. Another might be first-time homebuyers, looking to stock up on the essentials to fill their new home.

Once you know this, you can use social insights to better target individuals who fit the bill. Social media provides you with detailed demographic information. Identify individuals in a certain age category and income bracket who are most likely to be purchasing a home soon. The more information you can gather on your prospects and customers, the better, and CRMs bring all of this relevant information together so you can create even more detailed sketches of your ideal buyer personas.

3. Move Quickly to Make the Sale or Prevent Issues

Almost 40 percent of consumers say they expect a response to their social media comments within an hour! If you’re monitoring four social platforms, in addition to the rest of your workload, it’s nearly impossible to be that lightning-fast in responding if you don’t have a platform that allows you to manage all responses from one centralized place.

Fortunately, CRMs allow you to do just that. All customer comments and reviews can be tracked through your CRM. That way, your customer service or marketing team can get responses out ASAP.

A quick response time is critical throughout the customer journey. If a prospect has a question about a specific product or service, a quick response could mean they buy from you and not your competition. Or maybe someone wants to know about your brick-and-mortar store’s holiday hours. Getting back to them right away means they’ll be more likely to stop by and make a purchase during business hours.

For those who are already customers, responding to a positive post right away can help you amplify the goodwill and get even more reach with that post. On the flip side, a speedy response to an unhappy customer’s complaint can stop it from snowballing. Plus, you’ll demonstrate to other customers watching the interaction that you really care about making things right.

4. Eavesdrop on Conversations

Have you ever wondered what people say about you when you’re not in the room? With a social CRM tool, you can monitor conversations that are happening about your brand (but not with your brand) online.

A social CRM picks up on mentions or relevant hashtags, allowing you to stay on top of how your name is coming up in others’ conversations. Maybe you catch wind of a group of super-fans who are singing your new product’s praises over on a Facebook group page. You can then join that group (where you know there are relevant prospects), plus reach out directly to thank your fans for the social media love.

Or perhaps you discover something interesting through monitoring your hashtags. Let’s say you run an artisanal jam company. You create a catchy hashtag to promote your products, and you hear word that someone’s used your hashtag on Instagram! Then you find it’s an influencer who included your jam in a recent photo about their healthy breakfast. This allows you to reach out to the influencer directly, thank them for the mention, and open up a broader dialogue.

5. Pick Up on Good or Bad Vibes

Some social media CRMs today include sentiment monitoring tools. These tools analyze posts from followers and can glean information about tone and intent.

Let’s say you run a local lunch spot, and you launch a new menu. While you haven’t gotten many direct reviews on your pages yet, the sentiment monitor picks up on the way customers are talking about your business online, and it’s not great. They don’t love the changes you’ve made, and they’re missing some of the standbys on your old menu.

When you can get a handle on this feedback early, it empowers you to course-correct before you lose any customers. Why wait for the negative reviews to start cropping up? Instead, cut issues off at the pass based on the words and tone people are using on your page.

Similarly, this tool can help you identify strengths! If you have a social media post that gets lots of great, positive engagement, you should take a closer look at what you did there. Lean into that messaging and take a similar approach in future posts to keep the good vibes flowing.

CRMs are an essential tool for any small business. They help you pull valuable customer information all into one centralized location, which in turn ensures that all of your teams have access to the data they need to deliver great results. Taking advantage of these often-overlooked benefits of CRM use can help you stand out from the competition and build strong, meaningful relationships with your customers.