Use Social Media to Keep Current with Customers, Here’s Why

Social media is an untapped goldmine of sales intelligence that most people don’t use. Your customers are regularly posting content on social media, which can help fill in the picture about what’s going on with your customers. Using social media for account monitoring can help you uncover expansion opportunities, get ahead of problems, and enable you to keep in touch with your customers.

Acquiring a customer is expensive. It’s important to keep that customer once you have them. It’s hard to get a pulse on 20, 30, 40, or more customers every week. Laws of physics start to creep in with the amount of time spent sending template “just checking in” emails or leaving messages. Checking in at scale isn’t exactly the personal touch; your customers are pretty smart about detecting the all too obvious “check-in””.

Your contact at your customer account may not have all the information or may be deliberately withholding things that could adversely affect your business – layoffs, bad quarters, closing down offices, or engaging with competition all can mean losing the account. Another source of information outside of your contact helps.

Top 5 reasons why you should monitor your customers’ social media activity: 

1. Uncover new opportunities 

Depending on the size of your customer, your contact may not be aware of major initiatives or events that could mean new business for you. New hires, opening office buildings, company mergers or acquisitions, and new partnerships are all events that could mean expansion revenue for you. Companies typically announce these news items on their corporate social media accounts, and most times employees will chime in and promote these posts. You can learn a lot from what the company and its employees are saying, and don’t forget the comments too!

2. Uncover trouble spots

Your customers might not be posting about a bad quarter or layoffs, but employees and other interested parties are. Your executive champion might post about his last day with your customer or how excited they are for a new company they’re joining. You might see a company announcement regarding a new executive hire that they’re excited about, which might mean a review of all the vendors (or they bring in their favored vendors). Keeping up to date on changes like this can keep you better informed and ready for potential “bad news” coming from your customer. 

3. Keep current and in touch authentically

A simple like or “Congratulations!” on your customer’s social media posts is a great way to stay top of mind with little effort. Spending the extra few minutes to help a contact with a question or do a favor by boosting their post to your network is almost always noticed and appreciated. Done consistently and authentically, you will keep a closer digital relationship with your customer. They will appreciate the attention, and you will have a better chance at that new business conversation or potentially saving a renewal when you need it.

4. Be the one “”in the know””

Your CEO or CRO wants to be closer to key customers, especially the executives at that account. No one likes to look like a dope or get caught by surprise in these meetings. Social media can give you the most current news and interesting tidbits to help your executive – maybe there’s a charity event they sponsored or a major partnership announced. A simple weekly update can increase your visibility and value to your AE, Sales Management, or executive management.

5. Better connection with your customer

When it’s time to check in with your customer, having the most current information at your fingertips can be a great conversation starter. Instead of the awkward “how are things going?”, you have better conversation starters with the customer’s recent news or announcements. Customers love that you’re paying attention to them and are informed about their business.

You’ve got a few ways to do this – some easier than others. 

You can follow all your customers and check every day. That works if you have less than 10 customers. We all know that once you follow or connect with about 20 people on LinkedIn, your feed will get filled very quickly, and it’s almost impossible to find those posts in the firehose of the home page. Or you can click on the bios of each key contact and the company page every day and see new activity. After about 5 of those, you can see why this isn’t scalable.

Set up keyword alerts. Most social media platforms have options for following or searching keywords and hashtags. You can set these up for each of your customers. This will allow you to stay informed, but you will quickly run into the same problems as following your customers and checking your home feed or their bios every day.

Use a social media monitoring tool. These are much better at targeting and tracking specific content. With that said, many of these tools were built for monitoring conversations, particularly around reputation management and customer support vs. sales intelligence. And they can be prohibitively expensive – some starting at $1,000 per user per month.