Salesforce.com’s Social Marketing Evolves

By: Amanda @RainforceBlog Mcdonald  Salesforce recently unveiled the new Social Studio platform with unified social engagement for the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. The social listening, analysis, content marketing and engagement solutions help employees with their social interactions, from any device. Social Studio innovations include a new social listening engine, social customer service for service teams and social lead engagement for sales teams. Salesforce states that the lines between sales, service and marketing continue to blur and would like to help companies with their struggle to integrate social across business processes. According to a recent Gartner report, “a social media strategy to engage with customers is necessary, not optional, and CIOs will assert a greater role in application selection, as will marketing professionals.” (Michael Maoz, Jenny Sussin, Gartner Inc., Social for CRM Vendor Guide, February, 2014). Any developer, ISV, customer or partner can directly build and deploy an app within Social Studio. Social Studio’s Solutions Include a new social listening engine that monitors more than one billion social data sources including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, news sites and more. Integration with Social.com, the Marketing Cloud’s social advertising solution for agencies and advertisers, allows teams to monitor top performing content published from Social Studio and amplify it with sophisticated social advertising campaigns to reach more current and potential customers. We will also see New Social Customer Service. Customer service teams can easily monitor social channels for customer support issues, create customer cases to be managed in the Service Cloud and route these social cases to the right person or team to ensure a timely resolution. For the first time, any Service Cloud customer can now get started with social customer service for no additional charge, managing up to two Facebook or Twitter accounts directly from the Service Cloud. We can see enhanced Social Lead Engagement capabilities. Sales reps can find and connect to new customers faster with social lead generation. By listening to conversations across more than one billion social data sources, sales reps can identify new leads and engage with them in real-time directly from the Sales Cloud. New Social Studio listening is in beta and is currently scheduled to be generally available in February 2015. New social sales capabilities within the Sales Cloud are currently scheduled to be in beta in February 2015. Salesforce counts McDonald’s, Activision, ADP, Kellogg’s, Aetna, Honda, and JetBlue among the customers using Social Studio. I can’t wait to get their feedback 4 to 6 months from now.