Facebook is one of the largest single locations where your audience gathers. It stands to reason that any customer management app should be able to link into Facebook; if it can’t, what good is it? Anyone with aspirations of corporate level success needs to use a Facebook-linked CRM.
What Is a CRM Anyway?
In case you’re not sure, a CRM is a Customer Relationship Management platform. Basically, they’re apps that help you track your customers and monitor them throughout each stage of their slip down your sales funnel. When a user first engages with you, they get a new entry in your CRM. You can categorize users in a variety of ways, primarily based on the depth of their engagement. New users, leads, qualified leads, new customers, old customers, lapsed customers, and so on.
The power of a CRM is in the ability to dynamically interact with your users based on what you know about them. If a user contacts you via email, you can answer their questions, but with CRM-based knowledge to see that they’ve poked at your ads several times, you might be able to lay on the sales pressure a little harder.
CRMs can be useful for other business relationships as well, including those with colleagues and suppliers, though the primary benefit is in the name; customer relationships.
Your CRM platform can be useful for many roles within your organization. Your sales team can use it to see who they should be calling and how much pressure they should put on any individual they contact. Your support team can use it to identify what level of usage a user has and to offer them tailored solutions to their problems. Even your HR or recruiting department can use it to find people knowledgeable about your product to contact.
Linking a CRM with Facebook gives you access to a huge array of information you wouldn’t normally have. You can link an email and a name to a Facebook account and pull demographic information, contact information, sentiment for you or your competitors, and a whole lot more. Various CRMs are able to access different levels of information, so it’s a good idea to shop around and find the CRM that best suits you.
There are a ton of different CRMs available that can link to Facebook, since the Facebook developer documentation is publicly available, so anyone interested in developing an app can include that functionality. As such, the bulk of this post is going to be a simple list of those CRMs. I trust you to do your own analysis to figure out what you need out of a CRM, and filtering to pick the CRM that works best for you.
Note that some of these CRMs I’ve listed below might not integrate directly with Facebook; they’ll need a middleman like Zapier, IFTTT, or a different platform like HootSuite or Hubspot.
The Big List
Basic Databases: Excel, Google Drive, Etc. This first entry is a catch-all for a lot of basic database programs that can accumulate and help you manage your customer information. I don’t consider them CRMs, though Facebook lists them as part of their integrations. Apps like Zapier and IFTTT – that connect two other apps rather than perform CRM functions themselves – also go in this section. If I didn’t list one such program, pretend I put it here as part of the catch-all.
Mobit – Mobit is a mobile messaging and CRM platform that integrates into a wide variety of apps, including Facebook, and can deliver drip campaigns with a variety of useful triggers.
Magento – Magento is a huge e-commerce platform with a wide variety of features. They don’t have a lot of CRM built in, but they have several different CRM extensions you can purchase as added modules to expand its functionality.
ZoHo – ZoHo is a broad platform with social, CRM, campaign management, and project management features. The CRM is particularly useful as it is both easy to get started, useful without much configuration, and relatively cheap.
CleverTim – Not just a guy named Tim, this flexible CRM is primarily useful because of a broad range of integrations and the ability to see everything you want about a potential customer or lead at a glance, rather than having to drill down into databases or individual pages.
Vtiger – This company provides both a sales CRM and a helpdesk, with one unified option called Vtiger One to unify both if they’re useful to you. The CRM has appointment tracking, follow-ups, analytics, and a bunch more useful features worth exploring.
OnePage – This app attempts to take a traditional CRM and convert it into something a little less “informational database” and a little more “unified task list”. They simplify a lot of what you get out of a CRM and provide actionable information in a priority listing that can be quite useful to see a different perspective.
Act365 – A pipeline-focused CRM, the primary selling points for this platform are the low price tag starting at $10 per month, and the fact that it’s designed from the ground up to integrate flawlessly with Office 365. If you use that particular office suite, it can be a great companion app.
Capsule – A pretty great CRM that unfortunately needs a link up to a different platform to get the most out of it. It can be worthwhile, but only if you already have one of their other integrated platforms already configured and running with your business.
MoonMail – Not really a CRM, this is an email newsletter and contact management application that hooks directly into Facebook. It can do a lot to help you manage your Facebook lead ads, but is primarily useful for newsletter management.
Spiro – A unique offering among CRMs, this one leans heavily into helping you via automation that is powered by a rudimentary machine learning algorithm that they lovingly call an AI, though true AI is still something out of science fiction, not modern science. Might be worth a look if you’re constantly over-booked.
AgoraPulse – One of the best social media management platforms available, AgoraPulse has a nice free trial. It’s part CRM, part content manager, and part advertising platform. Every feature is useful, and the only thing holding it back is that a full scale solution runs around $160+ per month.
SendInBlue – Similar to MoonMail but with more CRM features. While this platform is primarily focused on marketing and messaging, it also has a good deal of CRM features as a foundation for that outreach.
Insightly – Insightly is far from unsightly. It’s a CRM that focuses on long-term relationships, with features that help with support, outreach, connections, and tracking the lifetime value of a user in your network.
VerticalResponse – VerticalResponse is primarily an email management app that, like SendInBlue, benefits a lot from having a customer relationship management platform at its core. You don’t need to worry about dealing with Excel tables to manage your contacts anymore.
Ecwid – Ecwid isn’t a traditional CRM; it’s a lot more heavily focused on running a storefront, with customer relationship features on the back end. One of the primary benefits in this instance is that it can let you run a storefront directly on Facebook or Instagram, no third party storefront needed.
Airtable – As a sort of cross between a shared spreadsheet, a database, and a CRM platform, this app helps with asset management and style, data accumulation and analytics, and customer relationship tracking. Follow your entire pipeline from contact to conversion with it for a relatively low price point.
Oracle Social – Oracle has been buying up a few CRMs and rolling their features together into one bundle deal, their Social Cloud. This is part social listener, part CRM platform, part analytics platform, and it’s surprisingly centralized for being made of disjointed parts.
Salesforce – Salesforce is one of the foremost authorities on enterprise-level business apps, and their CRM platform is no different. The CRM hub is quite useful, but figuring out which elements of their services you need is no small task, since the platform is very fragmented. I recommend contacting their sales team, but only if you’re really interested; they’ll be pushy.
Sprinklr – Named one of the best social media management companies by Forbes, Sprinklr offers a platform that has social management, advocacy, advertising, and analytics all in one. It’s a robust platform with a lot of useful features for brands of most sizes.
Sysomos – A Meltwater company, this platform has just about everything you need, from search and social listening to CRM and analytics features. The whole platform is very good, but it’s held back by a fairly high price point; enough that they don’t publish a link to pricing publicly, if that tells you anything.
Agile CRM – It’s a good all-in-one CRM, it’s right there in the name! Agile is a leader in a lot of business concepts, and their CRM helps integrate and put some of their more unique theories into practice. It even includes gamification features!
CloudYogi – An interesting CRM, this one is designed and primarily marketed to an Indian market. Their basic plan only costs about $10 USD per month, so it’s easy to get into, though you may have issues with currency conversion or quality of support.
ReferralRock – This is a referral and affiliate promotion platform, which is part of a robust business’s marketing strategy. Tracking which customers came from your advertising and which came from referrals can be a great way to start conversations.
Sprout Social – Another of the big names, I consider this one up there along with Salesforce, AgoraPulse, and several others as one of the top CRM platforms. They have a very nice free trial for you to see if you like what they have to offer, so give it a shot.
RowShare – RowShare is interesting because they’re basically a version of Excel or Google Sheets, except they have a few more collaboration features added on top. They link nicely with Facebook, if that’s your main criteria, though they don’t have a ton of useful CRM features.
ActiveProspect – This is a CRM that is more focused on lead acquisition than the follow-up. Some of you might consider this a fatal drawback, but sometimes you just really need a platform that can help bring new people into the fold, when your track record for converting people is high enough already.
Inbound Now – This is a platform that is mostly aimed at creating landing pages, but they help you track customers from the point of exposure to your ads on Facebook through landing on your landing page, submitting their email, and the drip campaigns you send to them thereafter.
TrackVia – TrackVia is a sort of cross between the basic spreadsheet and the full featured CRM. It’s a jumping off point for mid-sized businesses that don’t want to dig into a full-on CRM, but who have outgrown the basic spreadsheets. Don’t cling to that old XLS file, upgrade with this app.
Podio – Podio is a structured workflow manager that can help link up your various CRM needs with solutions. It can be a bit complex and might require some additional integrations, but at least it’s managed by Citrix, so it has those integrations with several leading business platforms.
Others – Facebook has a list of 19 pages of various business platforms, many of them offering CRM features, which can be found here. Obviously, I haven’t had the time or inclination to test any of them, so feel free to go digging yourself. Let me know what you like most in the comments!
