CRM

In the context of social media, customer relationship management refers to the strategies, tools, and technologies that businesses use to manage current and potential customer interactions across social media platforms. This doesn't mean using social media as a megaphone for bland marketing communications. Instead, it aims to build meaningful relationships with current and potential customers by engaging them in conversations.

This process entails using social media channels to engage with audiences, respond effectively to comments or messages, and come up with real-time insights that help businesses understand their customers' preferences, behaviors, and sentiment toward the brand. But that's only part of the story. We also have to make these customer insights work for us.

The companies that do this best have a secret ingredient—and it's not that they have more data. They have the secret of converting customer insights into actionable intelligence and using it to build better relationships. One way they do it is by creating a kind of social listening service, which we'll discuss in more detail in the next chapter.

Businesses that use social media can also be very good at using common demographic and psychographic data to create a target audience for the campaigns that they run. Having this audience defined and segmented allows businesses to run targeted social media ads during high-traffic events, which is one of the next steps in building the customer relationship.