6 Best Social CRM Platforms for 2018

Social customer relationship management (CRM) platforms combine traditional CRM software with social media management features, allowing businesses to better engage with prospects and customers online. We compared nearly 20 CRM options based on cost, ease of use and social features to find the top six social media CRM platforms platforms, including the best overall.

Top 6 Social CRM Platforms

How We Evaluated Social CRM Platforms

Social CRM platforms are sales pipeline tools that help salespeople manage their professional social media accounts as well as collect social information on prospects and customers. For this reason, we reviewed a large range of CRM featured and functionality options with social integrations to find those that allow users to easily prospect, communicate and collect valuable lead intelligence on social media.

The specific criteria we used to evaluate the best social CRM platforms include:

• Pricing: We compared the costs per user and any upgrade costs for additional items like extra file storage, increased contacts and email and data backup
• Social media: We only looked at platforms that have native social media integrations
• Ease of use: We reviewed the user interface and functionality of each potential social CRM option
• Integration: We looked at integration options with other platforms such as accounting software, chat and marketing automation
• Automation: We looked at each platform’s ability to automate sales and marketing functions like sales tasks, email nurturing and marketing
• Forecasting and analytics: We compared each platform’s ability to forecast sales and provide data for lead sources and sales activities
• Customer support: We reviewed the level of support provided, including helpfulness of knowledge bases and community support
• Customer satisfaction: We looked at how satisfied customers are overall and what, if any, common issues they had

Based on these criteria, Zoho CRM is the best social CRM platform. Zoho CRM offers the features businesses need to intelligently manage customers and prospects using social integrations, sales intelligence and marketing automation.

Best Overall Social CRM for Small Businesses: Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is a multichannel CRM that combines marketing automation, sales insights and social media integrations to give teams a powerful all-in-one social CRM solution. All social media visitor activities can be monitored and filtered within the software to help with sales prospecting, using real-time data from the various social media platforms as well as from email. Therefore, it is best for teams that want an all-in-one social CRM with the ability to prospect, interact and close deals using multiple channels.

Zoho CRM Pricing

Zoho CRM offers a free plan for three users with core contact management features and social integration. The Basic plan is $12 per user, per month and adds email tracking, lead scoring and email insights. The Professional is $20 per user, per month and also includes Twitter and LinkedIn interaction and social to lead capture.

Zoho CRM Tiered Features

Free

Zoho CRM’s Free plan includes Twitter and Facebook integrations and contact management with advanced filters and reports. It also includes 10 email templates, web-to-lead forms, a document library and team collaboration with direct messaging.

With these combinations of features, this plan offers more capabilities than any other free plan we reviewed. This makes it a good starting point for a small business wanting a basic contact management platform that can capture website leads from forms while also engaging prospects and customers with social channels.

Standard

For more robust social media management, the Standard plan will integrate with Zoho Social. This plan is $12 per user, per month and includes sales forecasting, email insights and visitor tracking. Email insights track email activity like opens, clicks and bounces, as well as other analytics. Within its reports, you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) for sales reps and create up to 10 custom dashboards, both features not found in other plans at this price.

Marketing campaigns provide templates and a drag-and-drop editor so that you can create “if/then” workflows using triggers to send the right message to the right social media contact. There are dozens of pre-designed templates or create your own. This plan is best for businesses with a multi-person sales team that wants social CRM functions and management tracking features under one roof.

Professional

The Professional plan is $20 per user, per month and includes the same functionality as the Standard plan plus SalesSignals and lead capture with leads from Facebook and Twitter. SalesSignals sends real-time notifications from customers who interact on social media, allowing sales to respond right away; it integrates with apps like Mailchimp, Zendesk and DocuSign, among others.

With lead generation automation, you can add leads from social media based on predefined parameters. The ability of SalesSignals to send notifications from social media, email and other applications is not found in any other platform we reviewed. The Professional plan is for companies that want to sell manage, market and sell to prospects using a CRM with powerful features.

[/fitlink] View of SalesSignals in a contact record. Screenshot courtesy of Zoho CRM.

What Zoho CRM Is Missing

Zoho CRM is missing native mobile marketing capabilities like those found in Agile CRM. You can integrate with Twilio to do text marketing but, based on the majority of reviews, it doesn’t work as advertised. Because of the included limited storage (1 GB), the cost for businesses with lots of storage needs like heavy attachment files or lots of contacts can start to add up fast.

What Users Think About Zoho CRM

Users generally like that it has a lot of features and that it is very customizable. Others like that it offers an entire suite of products that can all be linked together. Some users complained about the user interface saying that it is not intuitive. Also, the contact records are not at-a-glance views, meaning you have to scroll down to get all of the information. For more user reviews, visit our Zoho CRM review page.

Where to Find Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM combines a powerful CRM with feature-rich social media integration capabilities. It also has a lot of integration options with the company’s other platforms including support, project management and call center. Get started with the free version or jump right into a paid plan with a free 15-day trial and no credit card required.

Visit Zoho

Best Social CRM for Social Prospecting: Nimble

Nimble’s CRM is easy to use, and its social features make it a very capable prospecting tool while also remaining affordable. The tool’s social enrichment automatically updates company and contact social profiles within the CRM and its Signals feature lets you see social media engagement activities from all your prospects at a glance. Nimble is best for businesses needing an inexpensive social media CRM with a lot of integration options designed for social media prospecting.

Nimble Pricing

Nimble’s Contact plan is $9 per user, per month and includes 5,000 contacts, contact management and social media prospecting. The Business plan is $19 per user, per month and comes with forecasting, reports and social media signals. Although it doesn’t offer a free plan, it does offer a free 14-day trial.

Nimble Tiered Features

Contact

The Contact plan is $9 per user, per month and comes with 5,000 contact records, social profile matching and a social media prospecting tool, Prospector. Social profile match suggests new social media prospects automatically from Twitter, Instagram, AngelList, Crunchbase and Foursquare, among others. Its Prospector feature lets users find email addresses quickly by hovering over a social address and clicking “search for contact info.”

Missing from this plan are deal management, sales forecasting and reports, which are found in some similarly-priced competitor plans. If you are managing a team, you will want the features found in the Business plan. With the built-in prospecting features, this plan is ideal for solopreneurs who do not need to manage the sales pipeline process such as attorneys, accountants or other professional services.

Business

The Business plan costs $19 per user, per month and includes management features like sales forecasting, deal management and reporting. Manage, interact and schedule Twitter and Facebook posts within the real-time dashboard. It’s easy to schedule posts and sort by mentions, comments, likes and other engagement criteria, giving sales reps a central place to prospect socially.

Also included are deal pipeline management and sales forecasting and reports. However, it’s missing marketing automation functions that others like Zoho CRM, Agile CRM and BlueCamroo all offer. This plan is ideal for businesses that need a CRM with full social media capabilities including monitoring, interacting and prospecting.

[/fitlink] Manage and respond to social media with the real-time Signals feed. Screenshot courtesy of Nimble.

What Nimble Is Missing

There are minimal setting options for user permissions, which limits its security and privacy. The only access controls you have are the following: bulk import, bulk delete, application programming interface (API) access, pipeline configuration and deal privacy. So, as a manager, if you wanted to limit views for contacts or a rep’s activities, you’re out of luck. There’s also no built-in marketing automation feature like those found in Zoho CRM and Agile CRM.

What Users Think About Nimble

Nimble users like the many software integration options and the ability to see social interactions in real-time from the dashboard. Monitoring social feeds provides them with context used to “break the ice” in sales calls. For more user reviews, please visit our Nimble review page.

Where to Find Nimble

The CRM is inexpensive and provides a full-featured social monitoring and listening function for sales reps that employ social selling. Test drive all of Nimble’s features with a free, 14-day trial.

Visit Nimble

Best Free Social CRM with Unlimited Contacts: Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is a free social CRM with unlimited contacts as well as social media integrations. Its connections with Facebook, Instagram and others let you manage your social communications and interactions from one place. Therefore, it is best for businesses that want a free social media CRM with unlimited contacts and basic social media management integrations.

Bitrix24 Pricing

Bitrix24 offers three plans all with unlimited contacts, social functions, custom reports, email marketing, text messaging and leads from forms. The free plan allows for up to 12 users, the Plus costs $39 per month for 24 users, and the Standard is $99 per month for up to 50 users and five admins.

Bitrix24 Tiered Features

Free

The Free plan includes up to 12 users and 5 GB of storage and has social connections for Facebook, Instagram and Slack, letting you manage all of your social interactions from a central dashboard. The Facebook integration, for example, lets you comment and automate message distribution based on rules, with all conversations saved in the CRM’s history.

Aside from contact management, the CRM has the ability to pull in your Gmail account into the dashboard. The email marketing function provides several dozen templates as well as the ability to create custom templates. This plan is best for teams that have multiple users, need unlimited contacts and want email marketing. Compared to other free plans such as Agile CRM, it offers more out-the-box features.

Plus

The Plus plan includes advertising for Facebook. It costs $39 per month and allows for up to 24 users and two admins. Admins have access to other account users’ posts, tasks and files. There’s a document builder that allows you to create and share documents with your team and prospects and customers.

Voice broadcasting uses a computerized autodialer to deliver prerecorded phone messages and is a feature not found in the other platforms we reviewed. To learn more about phone systems for small businesses, visit our article VoIP vs. Landline. The number of allowed users and additional communication features make this plan ideal for organizations needing multiple channels to reach prospects and customers.

[/fitlink] Creating automation rules. Screenshot courtesy of Bitrix24.

Standard

The Standard includes open channels, which sends Facebook messages to the built-in chat messenger. You can configure the chat messenger to send an automated reply or immediately respond from the chat window. If it’s a new contact, a lead will automatically be created. An existing contact’s conversation will be added to their record. It costs $99 per month, allows for up to 50 users and five admins and provides 100 GB of online storage.

It also allows you to create up to 10 pipelines, giving companies with multiple lines of business a way to create distinct stages for each. Sales targets let you set goals for reps based on the number of deals or sales volume. This plan is best for companies that want more CRM customization and need multiple admins.

What Bitrix24 Is Missing

It’s missing the ability to create customized campaigns with mobile (text) marketing like what Agile CRM offers. The numerous business features like project management can also be a detriment to some users who just want basic CRM functionality without more complex features that can complicate the dashboard.

What Users Think About Bitrix24

Users like that it is a good all-in-one business solution in that it contains the CRM and support functions like live chat. They also like that many of these features are included in the free version. However, some users didn’t like the user interface, saying it’s too complex.

Where to Find Bitrix24

Bitrix24 includes a lot of features not found in other platforms, such as unlimited contacts, multi-channel social integrations and live chat. The free version with its multiple users, social features and email marketing is enough to get most small businesses started. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Visit Bitrix24

Best Social CRM with Feature-rich Social Capabilities: BlueCamroo

BlueCamroo combines a CRM with marketing, project management and support ticketing as well as email marketing and lead capture from social media. It offers customizable social keyword searches and provides feed channel monitoring for Twitter and Facebook. This platform is best for service businesses that need a capable social media CRM with an integrated project management suite.

BlueCamroo Pricing

BlueCamroo keeps pricing simple by offering one plan for $41 per user, per month with unlimited contacts and projects. The CRM includes lead capturing, qualification and nurturing to monitor multiple Twitter and Facebook feeds. The project management tool has automation, time tracking, budgeting and other features.

BlueCamroo Features

BlueCamroo is a capable CRM with a social media integration that is highly customizable by keyword mentions, geography, buzz and other filters. The CRM can capture leads from forms, email and social media and has lead nurturing and email marketing capabilities. Also included is a project management platform that schedules, tracks and bills projects, and there’s a customer support feature with a knowledge base and ticket tracking.

Sales Pipeline Management

The CRM provides contact management that gives a 360-degree view of a contact’s social media streams, email activity, support cases, call record, sales orders, projects and more. You can customize the view for leads, opportunities and customers. Leads can be captured automatically by web form and email and manually from social media contacts. Integrated customizable quote templates let you create and send out quotes.

Social CRM

The social CRM component allows the monitoring of multiple Twitter and Facebook feeds from the Social Scout feature and the creation of leads, cases and tasks directly from social messaging. With sales opportunity search, you can create a filter to “listen” for specific keywords mentioned on Twitter and within Facebook updates (with public permissions). To see other ways Facebook is used in marketing, check out our article featuring Marketing Tips from the Pros

For example, a local lawn service company might set its Facebook filter for a 30-mile radius for the phrase “Can anyone recommend lawn care” or “I’m looking for lawn care.” You can make these as broad or specific as you like. On the service side, you can filter by sentiment for your customers and the industry. Phrases with words like “rocks,” “sucks,” “love” and “terrible” can help identify both unhappy customers and opportunities from competitors.

[/fitlink] Screenshot courtesy of BlueCamroo.

Project Management

This function takes closed sales from the CRM and converts them to projects where you can define project stages, milestones, assign tasks and share project updates. Collaboration lets you invite customers and suppliers to participate in a project, sharing documents and automating client sign-off of project stages. Built-in timesheets and task logging track time, calculating charges and creating invoices automatically.

Email Marketing

BlueCamroo incorporates an email marketing tool to help automate your communication process. It starts with the campaign manager where you can create multipart email campaigns using triggers with predefined intervals for delivery. The dashboard tracks campaigns by emails sent, click-throughs, opened and unsubscribed providing a basic snapshot of performance.

What BlueCamroo Is Missing

BlueCamroo lacks the brand recognition of the other larger products we compared as well as some of the more robust integrations. It also doesn’t have social media scheduling like that found in Nimble. Lastly, missing is the ability to track visitors on the site, which provides behavior information for sales and marketing.

What Users Think About BlueCamroo

BlueCamroo is a very small company with a relatively tiny footprint in the CRM space. As a result, there aren’t many user reviews. Those we did find liked how versatile the platform is as both a CRM and project management platform, noting that it tracks much of their business in one system. Others were impressed by the “social-media style” user interface. During my trial, I found its team to be very responsive to questions I had.

Where to Find BlueCamroo

BlueCamroo packs a lot of features into an intuitive platform with a CRM, project management tools and advanced social media prospecting functions. There’s also support capability with ticketing. You can sign up for a free, 14-day trial with access to all of the paid features. However, it requires a demo before providing access to the platform because of the dizzying number of features and capabilities.

Visit BlueCamroo

Best No-frills Social CRM for Solopreneurs: Capsule

Capsule is a no-frills CRM having one of the most simple and intuitive interfaces of all those we reviewed. Its social integration connects with Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to receive feeds and respond via Twitter directly from a contact’s record. Also included are a mobile app, calendar and task features. This makes it ideal for solopreneurs who want an inexpensive, easy-to-use social CRM they can access anywhere.

Capsule Pricing

Capsule offers two plans: Free for two users, with 250 contacts and 10 MB of storage and Professional for $18 per user, per month with 10 GB of storage and capacity for 50,000 contacts. Both plans include social media integration, mobile app and sales forecasting. A free 30-day trial is offered for the Professional.

Capsule Tiered Features

Free

The Free plan’s social integration pulls in a contact’s Twitter feed, allowing you to respond from their record. It will also search for additional social profiles automatically. It allows for up to two users, 250 contacts and a clean Kanban pipeline dashboard. A handy feature if you’re on-the-go is the mobile app. Update data even when you’re offline, start calls or email from a contact, view a contact’s location on the map, see contact history and manage your calendar.

This has the cleanest user interface of any of the platforms we reviewed; it’s uncluttered and intuitive. While the contacts and storage can be outgrown quickly, it’s a nice starter plan for a one-person business wanting to keep organized no matter where they are with the mobile app. The Twitter integration provides another way to prospect and communicate with customers and leads.

Professional

The Professional includes 10 GB of storage, 50,000 users and costs $18 per user, per month. It also includes integrations with FreeAgent, Xero, FreshBooks, Mailchimp and others. Other than these upgrades, the features are the same as the Free plan. However, the contacts and storage limits give most small businesses plenty of room to grow.

The reporting is minimal compared to any of the other software we reviewed. Trackable are forecasts, conversion rates and pipeline by milestone showing how many opportunities are associated with each customizable milestone. One handy feature is the ability to tag opportunities to identify them further by category, like services or products. The low cost and ease of use make this ideal for a growing solopreneur who needs to stay organized on the go.

[/fitlink] The contact record showing Tweets and other details. Screenshot courtesy of Capsule.

What Capsule Is Missing

Capsule’s light-weight interface and cost are what make it appealing. That said, what’s missing maybe a deal breaker for some. For example, there is no email marketing function like those offered by Nimble, Zoho CRM and BlueCamroo. You also need to purchase its highest-tiered Teams plan (not reviewed here) to get any user access controls. Finally, you can only create one pipeline, which will be problematic for businesses with multiple business lines.

What Users Think About Capsule

Users like the that the dashboard is clearly organized and easy to navigate and that it was easy to be effective with it immediately. Others liked the integrations, particularly G Suite, Twitter and Mailchimp. One user noted that it’s not very customizable. To see more comments, visit our Capsule review page.

Where to Find Capsule

Capsule’s simple, intuitive dashboard and mobile app make it convenient for on-the-go business people who want to start using it effectively right away. The social integration provides another way to communicate with prospects and clients right from a contact’s record. You can sign up for a free 30-day trial by visiting its website.

Visit Capsule

Best Social CRM with Robust Marketing Capabilities: Agile CRM

Agile CRM is a contact management system with built-in social monitoring, lead scoring and email campaign functionality. The marketing automation features allow you to create customized campaigns with event triggers and includes text-based marketing. This platform is for businesses that want robust marketing automation capabilities within a social CRM.

Agile CRM Pricing

Agile CRM’s free plan allows for 10 users and includes contact management, lead scoring and email campaigns. The Starter plan costs $9.99 per user, per month, includes 10,000 contacts, three integrations, marketing automation and social monitoring. The Regular plan costs $39.99 per user, per month and includes 50,000 contacts and mobile marketing.

Agile CRM Tiered Features

Free

The Free plan allows for up to 10 users, 1,000 contacts and companies and includes lead scoring, email tracking and email campaigns. There’s built-in email marketing functionality that allows you to send emails without connecting to a third party like Gmail. You can connect social accounts like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but these are considered integrations so you can only connect one before having to upgrade.

Your one connected social account like Twitter will display a feed in the contact record. The pipeline lets you drag and drop deals between the different stages. There’s a tab that displays a customized view of activities by type, users and date, providing a snapshot of all that’s going on. This plan is ideal for a small business like service company that wants different email communications options.

Starter

The Starter plan costs $9.99 per user, per month, includes 10,000 contacts, marketing automation and social monitoring. With social monitoring, you can integrate up to three accounts, seeing live streams and monitoring feeds for brand mentions in Twitter, for example. You can also post updates, interact with customers and leads and monitor streams for keywords.

The marketing automation function lets you create multichannel campaigns. For example, you can create a campaign for onboarding new users with scheduled messages throughout the process. There’s also an A/B testing function, a feature found in only one other platform. This plan is best for businesses like a software as a service (SaaS) startup that wants automation and social integration in a CRM.

[/fitlink] Campaign setup on Agile CRM. Screenshot courtesy of Agile CRM.

Regular

The Regular plan costs $29.99 per user, per month, includes 50,000 contacts, mobile marketing and increases the number of campaign workflows and automated triggers to 10. It also allows for over 50 integrations, which means that you can connect all the social accounts it offers plus Android (for calls with mobile), RingCentral, Twilio (for texts), Stripe, PayPal, Shopify and more.

With mobile marketing, you can send text messages using triggers for instances promotions, upgrades, subscriptions and billing. This feature makes it stand out among all of the reviewed CRMs. With its mobile marketing and extensive integrations, this is best for businesses that have a high volume of customers they want to track.

What Agile CRM Is Missing

Unlike a platform like Zoho CRM and Bitrix24, there is no live chat support, which can be convenient for quick questions and lacks features like Zoho CRM’s artificial intelligence social signals. Also, in order to cancel a subscription, you must call its support team first.

What Users Think About Agile CRM

Agile CRM users generally like its intuitive design and many features like the ability to automate emails for things like cart abandonment. Several users complained about the ability to cancel service without having to contact support first. Visit our Agile CRM reviews page to learn more about the platform.

Where to Find Agile CRM

Agile CRM is a robust CRM with a powerful social and marketing automation suite to target sales leads and to communicate with both leads and customers automatically. The ability to create mobile marketing campaigns make it stand out among the other CRMs we reviewed. Start a 14-day trial for the free plan.

Visit Agile CRM

The Bottom Line

Social CRMs integrate contact management functions with social media tasks like stream monitoring, interactions and keyword targeting to help businesses sell more intelligently by understanding pain points and interests.

We found that Zoho CRM offered the most capable social CRM because it combines social media functions with marketing, sales and support. This makes it a versatile, all-in-one platform ideal for any small and medium business. Best of all, you and up to three users can try it for free with no time restrictions.

Visit Zoho