Sprout Social Inc.
10/18/2024 | News release | Archived content
Marketing Disciplines Other Platforms Social media integration strategies your brand needs
Social media integrations are a great way to combine marketing efforts across channels. They help customers shop directly from social networks like TikTok and Instagram, enhancing the shopping experience with seamless e-commerce. And provide brands with valuable social data for critical customer and market insights. In this way, social media integrations help you create memorable brand experiences for your audiences, including world-class customer care.
You're able to level up your marketing efforts through a more streamlined omnichannel strategy to improve your online presence and user engagement. Plus, you dissolve digital siloes and provide smooth customer interactions that lead to better conversions, ultimately increasing revenue.
Read on to explore the different ways you can take advantage of social media integrations to grow your business. Plus, find real-life examples of brands that use social media integrations to strengthen their omnichannel presence to provide a cohesive customer journey.
What is social media integration?
Social media integration is the practice of connecting a brand's social media platforms with other digital tools like CRMs, e-commerce platforms or websites to create a seamless, unified experience for users. It enables customers to easily use their social media account or associated email address to interact, shop or sign in without switching between different apps or sites for an enriched omnichannel customer experience.
Social media integration also helps marketing teams have smoother social media workflows. It gives them valuable customer and market insights, helping them understand the impact of their social media efforts on conversions and brand sentiment.
Benefits of social media integrations
Social media integrations streamline customer interactions across digital platforms and provide valuable insights to marketers to achieve business goals. Here are more benefits in detail.
Streamlined workflow
Integrating social media platforms with your digital tools like CRM software, email marketing, sms marketing and analytics simplifies and automates your social media workflow. Teams can manage content creation, scheduling and performance tracking, without missing a beat. You're also able to integrate your social platforms with customer service platforms, like Salesforce Service Cloud, to manage queries and complaints for faster customer support on social media.
Enhanced customer insights
Social media integrations help you connect your social data with your customer databases, which gives you a better, well-rounded understanding of your audience. This enables you to develop data-driven proactive marketing strategies that are personalized and targeted for better results.
Improved engagement
According to The 2023 Sprout Social Index™, 51% of consumers think the most memorable thing a brand can do is respond to customers on social.
Social media integrations enable real-time interaction across platforms so your customer care teams respond faster to customer inquiries and complaints, as well as positive feedback.
This prompt and regular engagement helps create a memorable brand experience, which fosters better customer relationships.
Centralized analytics
Social media integrations with analytics tools like Google Analytics or Facebook Insights help you track performance across channels to understand how your social media efforts are influencing traffic, engagement and sales. Plus, consolidating data from different platforms into one dashboard enables you to monitor key metrics and measure performance to make data-driven decisions more efficiently. It also helps you prove your social ROI to decision-makers and leadership teams through impactful data storytelling.
Cross-channel consistency
Brands can build consistent brand messaging across multiple channels, making it easier to maintain a cohesive online presence. For example, you can link all your social media profiles with your websites, blogs and other apps so customers can buy your products or services directly through social media posts or ads. Audiences can also share your content or engage with you on whichever platform they frequent.
How to use social media integrations in your marketing strategy
Social media integrations help you optimize your marketing strategy and improve your product offerings based on customer interactions. Here are some ways you can use integrated tools to engage customers, drive conversions, monitor sales and increase revenue.
Connect e-commerce with social media
Connecting your e-commerce to social media is one of the best marketing strategies to impact sales. For example, e-commerce social media integrations like Shopify and Facebook Shops enable you to create shoppable posts, making it easy for customers to purchase directly from your social media platforms without leaving the app.
If you already use Shopify or Facebook Shops, Sprout's social commerce integration is a great way to streamline order management and customer information. You can increase your product awareness and add engaging sales opportunities to your content by scheduling posts with product links.
You can also help customers more efficiently by accessing all relevant order information from one dashboard instead of toggling between different platforms. Plus, respond with personalized messages that help them make prompt purchases. Explore platforms like TikTok and YouTube for shopping integrations by linking videos to product pages, making it easy for customers to shop in-app.
Personalized ads on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok help you retarget customers who have visited your online store but haven't bought anything. You can feature the exact products they've browsed or combine them with promotions or discounts to encourage conversions.
Further boost your omnichannel strategy by adding email marketing to the mix. Supercharge your email campaigns with insights from your social data. Expand the reach of your newsletters and grow your audiences through targeted links.
Keep track of your social commerce analytics often to see how well it's working and how much traffic comes from referrals. This will help you improve your strategy over time. Building UTM parameters separately for your most-used links every time you publish on social media can be a hassle. But, it can be seamless with Sprout's Google Analytics and Bitly integrations that bake link creation into your Publishing workflow.
Sprout's Google Analytics integration helps you create tracking rules to automatically append parameters to your links in the posts you share in Sprout. These parameters then add the tracking results in Google Analytics (which you can also see in Sprout's Google Analytics Report). You can create and edit URL tracking rules within Sprout, which will get automatically applied in Sprout's Compose publishing window when the URL is added to a post.
Sync social media with your CRM
Integrating social media with your CRM tools is a powerful way to centralize customer data and interactions. For example, with Sprout, you can connect your LinkedIn account to your Salesforce CRM software. This will let your sales teams track leads, view social interactions and manage customer relationships directly from the CRM, making it easier for them to nurture prospects.
It also helps track customer engagement, conversations and customer preferences within one system.
You can link existing Salesforce contacts to new social profiles in the same workflow. If there isn't an existing Salesforce contact, you can create one directly from within Sprout to capture the new lead in your marketing funnel. Once a lead has been created or linked, you can see Salesforce Contact and Case info related to this specific user directly from the reply layer in Sprout's Smart Inbox.
Sprout's lead management integrations also include Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Once integrated, you can use this funneled data to create personalized marketing campaigns. By tracking how customers use your products and services on social media and in your CRM, you can send them offers that are right for them. You can also retarget users and improve your messages for higher conversion rates.
Plus, real-time social media interactions feeding into your CRM also help your support and sales teams respond more effectively to customer inquiries or complaints. Thus, creating a seamless experience to build stronger customer relationships and drive strategic marketing initiatives.
Explore review and reputation management integrations
Review and reputation management integrations like the ones Sprout has for review platforms like TrustPilot or Glassdoor help you strengthen your online reputation. This social integration enables you to monitor and manage reviews across your business and locations in one centralized stream.
Similarly, connect your social accounts with Google My Business (GMB). Set up custom notifications every time a review comes in and sort reviews into custom priority inboxes. For example, set up alerts from negative reviews with one or two stars. Respond right away to reviewers from within Sprout to address a poor customer experience, offer a resolution, clarify doubts or thank them for leaving a review.
Review integrations also help you share positive reviews across your social profiles to boost your brand's credibility. This approach strengthens your brand reputation and builds customer relationships by showing that you value their feedback.
Tracking reviews and social media interactions from one single source of truth also makes it easier for you to spot trends in market demands and customer sentiment.
Integrate customer support with social media tools
Customer care integrations are all about passing customer tickets and information between teams. These integrations are a great fit if you find that customer questions on social media often need to be passed to a different team to answer. They also give teams visibility into customers' previous contact history with your organization for faster, more personalized care.
Sprout's integration with Salesforce Service Cloud is a game-changer in customer care. Salesforce's global partnership with Sprout gives you a comprehensive view of your customers. This enables you to deliver world-class social customer care plus turn your social data into crucial business insights.
Your care teams can talk to customers in real-time to fix issues with all the right information. They have access to CRM data along with social data like conversation history and customers' contact information for a seamless workflow-all through one unified dashboard.
In addition, Salesforce's AI assistant, Agentforce, enables customer care teams to gain insights into customers' history with your brand through AI-populated summaries of sentiment and cross-channel case overviews. This helps care agents and managers improve customer experience with deeper customer insights-delivered in real-time-translating into faster case resolution time.
Similarly, Sprout's Zendesk integration with Facebook helps customer support teams track and respond to support requests to ensure a quick and smooth customer service experience. Once connected, Sprout automatically looks up users who've messaged you from your Zendesk instance and matches them with an existing profile. If a profile doesn't exist, you can create one.
This helps customer care teams create Tickets easily and assign priority tags to the comments more easily. They can also coordinate with other team members more easily and document the Ticket status.
Another example is Sprout's Hubspot integration, which fortifies customer support with intuitive ticket routing and updates. Manage your HubSpot contacts and tickets directly from Sprout's Smart Inbox. Link relevant social profiles to HubSpot contacts and then view, edit, create and comment on all HubSpot tickets directly from Sprout.
Create meaningful customer experiences by tailoring your messages to customers' unique needs and also use the data to identify trends to improve your care.
Combine social media data with business intelligence for cross-channel insights
Social data is the bedrock of business intelligence because it brings context to organization-wide data. It uncovers audience insights needed to interpret trends, develop predictions and create informed, data-driven decisions.
With Sprout Social's Salesforce integration and Tableau Business Intelligence (BI) Connector, you can leverage the power of social data to create a 360-degree view of your customer and inform wider business insights.
For example, if your brand has a sophisticated social presence that's grown to include customer care, you'd want to analyze agent performance across data sources. This will inform your marketing strategy, product development and other organizational focuses. However, if your team uses Tableau, for instance, to aggregate marketing and customer care data without social data, a big slice of the customer view is missing.
Connect your Sprout data to Tableau and get an omnichannel view of all your social data plus automated and consolidated reporting and analytics. With customizable visuals and metric definitions, you're able to slice the data based on your KPIs and business needs to create a compelling data story with social media intelligence for actionable insights. And do all this without expensive developer resources.
4 real-life brand examples of social media integrations
Here are four brands that use social media integrations to create stronger omnichannel marketing strategies. Let's dive into the details of how they're boosting the impact of social media on business and using it to their advantage.
1. Amazon
Amazon uses social media integrations for an omnichannel strategy that includes strategic advertising, engaging customers and driving traffic to its website-all while enhancing the entire shopping experience.
The brand integrates its product catalog with Facebook and Instagram Ads and uses targeted Ads based on customers shopping behavior and interests. For example, if a customer browses a product on Amazon but doesn't make a purchase, they may see a retargeted ad on Instagram or Facebook offering a discount or free shipping, encouraging them to complete the transaction.
Amazon also successfully uses influencers to grow its brand. Its influencer program incentivizes bloggers and influencers to share Amazon products via links across platforms like Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. During Prime Day, Amazon partners with TikTok influencers to create viral videos around Prime Day deals. TikTok users who interact with these videos are directed to Amazon's app or website, where they can browse and purchase Prime Day deals.
Amazon also integrates its product listings with Pinterest, where users can discover and pin products from Amazon's vast catalog. Plus, social reviews on platforms like Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), tagged with #FoundItOnAmazon, help the company integrate user-generated content into product listings.
Amazon also takes advantage of social media for prompt customer service. Its @AmazonHelp account on X is where customers can tweet their issues, questions or concerns and get quick help from the Amazon customer service team.
The company also uses interactive shopping through Amazon Live for live-streamed events where viewers can engage in real-time and buy featured products directly.
All these social media integrations help Amazon build engagement, drive traffic and increase conversions. It also gives its customers a cohesive shopping journey and a memorable brand experience.
2. Sephora
Sephora uses social media integrations to create a seamless omnichannel marketing experience. The brand ensures a smooth customer journey from discovery to checkout by integrating its Instagram and Facebook Shops. This helps customers explore, review and purchase products directly from social media.
Similarly, through Pinterest's "Shop the Look" Pins, users can explore beauty tutorials and product recommendations, leading directly to Sephora's e-commerce site for effortless purchasing.
Sephora also enhances engagement with YouTube, creating shoppable tutorials and demos where viewers can purchase featured products through linked descriptions.
Their email-social integration ties email marketing to social media platforms, retargeting users with personalized ads based on their email interactions. This ensures consistency in messaging and drives conversion across platforms.
Sephora's Beauty Insider loyalty program is integrated across social media, e-commerce sites like Groupon and in-store, encouraging customers to earn and redeem rewards from various touchpoints. Plus, their AR integration with Snapchat enables users to virtually try on makeup and links directly to Sephora's store for purchases, creating a complete cycle from virtual trial to checkout.
3. H&M
H&M integrates social media into its omnichannel marketing strategy to create a seamless shopping experience across platforms. By using shoppable Instagram and Facebook posts, the clothing retailer enables customers to browse and buy products directly through social media, linking these platforms to their website and app for easy purchases. Plus, it uses Pinterest's "Shop the Look" pins, turning fashion inspiration into quick sales by directing users to product pages.
The company also uses email integrations for social retargeting. It uses personalized ads on Facebook and Instagram to re-engage customers who interacted with their website or email campaigns but didn't complete a purchase. They further integrated their mobile app with social media, encouraging users to follow H&M for exclusive deals and collections. They also provide the ability to save products from social posts for future purchases.
H&M takes advantage of user-generated content (UGC) through branded hashtags like #HMxME featuring real customer outfits both on social media like their YouTube and product pages to foster engagement.
The brand also collaborates with influencers on TikTok and uses paid ads to promote new collections, so users can shop directly through the app. This consistent, omnichannel approach helps H&M build engagement and drive sales across multiple touchpoints.
4. Shopify
Shopify used social media integrations to transform e-commerce processes for businesses looking to combine their social media presence with e-commerce capabilities.
The brand enables users to benefit from social selling on platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook, empowering them to engage with their audiences and grow to their full potential.
And since Shopify is a platform centered on integrations, naturally they're using them to their advantage internally, too. It integrates with Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and other platforms to run targeted ads promoting its tools, features and testimonials to reach entrepreneurs, attract businesses and generate leads.
The brand also uses social media integrations to boost its customer care efforts by integrating with platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. This way, it provides users with real-time customer support and builds engagement to improve the brand experience.
Beyond these workflows, the brand positions many of its social media integrations as partnerships to market itself and attract attention from business owners looking to use social media for growth.
Shopify often collaborates with TikTok and Instagram to create joint marketing campaigns to showcase their integration capabilities. It also uses TikTok and YouTube videos to highlight its new features and share tips for entrepreneurs. This helps it position itself as the prominent choice for anyone looking to benefit from social commerce.
The brand also partners with influencers and content creators to promote itself. These influencers share tutorials, case studies and discuss reviews, positioning Shopify as an advanced but user-friendly tool for those wanting to build and grow their online business. Shopify also relies on user-generated content to build trust among its audiences and encourages merchants to share success stories on their social platforms.
Shopify's story is unique-they've made an entire business model out of social media integrations and how they can elevate a brand's online presence.
Experience seamless business integrations with Sprout
Sprout is built to remove digital silos, so our customers immediately tap into the robust power of social. While organizing and integrating your ecosystem of tools can sound overwhelming, it doesn't have to be. Integrating the tools you rely on most makes your team more informed and efficient and your customer experience stronger. Plus, it gives you all the insights you need to create an evergreen brand and stay ahead of the competition.
Experience seamless business integrations with Sprout. Sign up for a demo today.
Annette Chacko
Annette Chacko is a Content Strategist at Sprout where she merges her expertise in technology with social to create content that helps businesses grow. She loves history and etymology. In her free time, you'll often find her at museums and art galleries, or chilling at home watching war movies.